The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and the City

Setha Low, Setha Low

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317296973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and the City provides a comprehensive study of current and future urban issues on a global and local scale. Premised on an 'engaged' approach to urban anthropology, the volume adopts a thematic approach that covers a wide range of modern urban issues, with a particular focus on those of high public interest. Topics covered include security, displacement, social justice, privatisation, sustainability, and preservation. Offering valuable insight into how anthropologists investigate, make sense of, and then address a variety of urban issues, each chapter covers key theoretical and methodological concerns alongside rich ethnographic case study material. The volume is an essential reference for students and researchers in urban anthropology, as well as of interest for those in related disciplines, such as urban studies, sociology, and geography.

Part I
Precarity

1
Precarious detachment

Youth and modes of operating in Hyderabad and Jakarta

AbdouMaliq Simone

Instability has become a critical modality through which the power of capital accumulation is recomposed and reiterated. In key ways, the long-term instabilities of urban life strategically maintained by many urban inhabitants, engendering the continuous updating and remaking of various forms of life, have now been “stolen” by more powerful economic actors. As a result, current trajectories of urban change emphasizing security of tenure, propriety through property, inclusiveness through debt, and on the equation of affordances with affordability, and the enforced promotion of resilience through the attenuation of social contracts have a debilitating impact on the sociability of city life. These technologies of apparent “stability” disentangle various solidarities, collaboration, and economies built on the continuous recalibration and plying of relations among different kinds of actors and activities.

This essay reflects on a study of youth in six cities and demonstrates an unintentional or calculated indifference to this “theft” on the part of these youth. It attempts to show the ways they navigate urban space – ways that are not easily included within the constantly shifting frontiers of accumulation and political normalcy, and as such reorder the conventional terms through which life in the city is spoken about and experienced. Many of the youth who were interviewed about how they make sense of urban life and what is required in order to attain a viable position within it emphasized the importance of simultaneity – of being in the midst of different places and networks of care all at the same time. They decouple themselves from a fixed set of aspirations and development trajectories and instead use the infrastructures of the city as a means not so much to “settle” within as to “traverse” territorial and institutional boundaries. Their practice is not about finding ways to include what is rendered irrelevant or marginal within the existent modalities of everyday life, but rather to logistically elaborate new modalities capable of making judicious use of them.

In many respects cities now embody the exhaustion of labor’s creativity and the prospect of uncertain and substantial rearrangements of human existence itself. Urban lives and materials are increasingly hedged in convoluted financial infrastructures, purportedly in order to generate the money needed simply to keep cities afloat in their present state, let alone introduce the massive interventions necessary to provide sufficient work, services and built environments for the future (Kirpatrick and Smith 2011). It is often unclear who or what actually runs things, as complicities of all kinds between supposed antagonists are often necessary in order to maintain any semblance of order (Willis 2015). The particular ways bodies, things, spaces, and the relations among them mutually compose themselves engender both dynamic, uneven, inventive, and intensely problematic experiences and expressions for those who inhabit them.

These problematics of inhabitation then constitute the primary focus of this study. The study tried to elicit what youth deem to be the outlooks and practices needed in order to make any kind of future life. What do they pay attention to when so many parameters and variables are potentially relevant, when the efficacy of normative protocols for pursuing livelihood diminishes in the face of intensified arbitrariness, and when the technologies for evaluation seem so totalizing at the same time as any kind of stability appears more elusive? In cities where precarity refers to conditions of intensified uncertainty, the inability of any specific reading of conditions to take hold, and to fleetingness as the modality of instrumental action, what affective, conceptual, and practical sensibilities do youth mobilize to operate within precarious conditions? Without minimalizing the extensive desperation, violence, or dogged persistence of holding on to anything, what other atmospheres of urban living are perhaps constituted?

In listening to the voices and observing the practices of youth in Abidjan, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Berlin, Athens, and Karachi, a group of researchers, assembled under the auspices of the Urbanizing Faith Program of Humboldt University, the University of South Australia, and the Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, explores the prospects of new modes of urban living through the ways in which youth are taking on their futures. In abstracting from these engagements it is possible to discern various modalities of practice at work. These practices are not so much distinct entities as the outlines or shadows of provisional coalescence. All have highly permeable boundaries, relying upon shifting interfacial relations of figure and ground, where the surface of what appears to be one particular practice provides a “screen” or layer of opacity for others to work, or fail, without being detected.

In this presentation at hand, I will work with materials from two of the research cities, Hyderabad and Jakarta. Here the research was anchored by two “urban laboratories” – NGOs with long-term engagements in local urban social movements, which also had conducted a wide range of research studies on local economies and markets, urban revitalization projects, and employment. Using these past studies and the institutional and community networks consolidated from them, fifty youth from various class backgrounds, residential locations, and education levels were identified and then interviewed on several occasions during a six-month period. The protocols asked youth to show interviewers the key spaces in which they conducted their lives, as well as show them places in the city to which they aspired more intensive affiliations, as well as places with which they were familiar but no longer wanted to have anything to do with. When possible, interviewers were also introduced to people whom youth considered to be of particular significance to their particular practices of livelihood and aspiration. Interviews thus took place across a wide range of settings and backgrounds.

From these interview materials, local researchers collaboratively attempted to conceptualize a series of practices through which youth oriented themselves towards and acted on the city. The practices I take up here include crafting, as an aesthetics of continuous reappearance that addresses an oscillating field of opportunities, as the person stylizes a specific performance aimed at luring or captivating the attention of some and the dis-attention of others.

Waiting and accelerating deal with the temporal dimensions of what is considered possible, of how quickly a person attempts to intervene into a situation or allows things to unfold. Everyday life is wrapped up in the compulsion to act quickly and the diffusion of incessant opportunities that need to be seized. But there is also evidence of failure all around, of risks that compound debt, so that the capacity to wait, even with all its disciplinary and submissive connotations, is a critical tool in terms of cultivating an ability to read and play “the field”. Yet at the same time, many youth also actively attenuate fears of failure by adamantly “making their moves” and then “moving on”, taking what they can from any situation without investments over the long term. Other youth surmise particular trajectories of change, and willingly position themselves in situations where nothing seems to be happening at the moment, but where they anticipate being the recipients of particular amalgamations of forces and opportunities that are “headed their way” and which have the capacity to fruitfully alter their lives if they are willing to wait.

As cities are domains of waste – of wasted lives and ways of doing things – as well as sites of wasting as a mechanism of biopolitical control, harvesting is a means of recuperating such waste, of putting it to work. Here, bits and pieces of solidarities, cultural memories, discarded materials, and the fuzzy interstices that are created through uneasy juxtapositions in rapidly restructured urban environments become resources for livelihoods.

Practices are deployed within and across specific places, and the cities this project engaged are replete with heterogeneous sites and configurations of action. In addition to the readily discernible machines and aggregates – such as households, factories, markets, malls, institutions, stations – are both obdurate and ephemeral formations, such as packs, warungs (multifunctional small shops), short-term rooming houses, over- and underpasses, backrooms, plazas, stairwells, vacant lots, game rooms, lobbies, interchanges, corners, enclaves, swarms, chat rooms, and hashtags.

Particularly important to this discussion are practices of detachment. Youth, increasingly aware of their own expendability and the seeming arbitrariness entailed in who gets ahead or not, actively pursue ways of subtracting themselves from what is expected of them. Additionally, the incorporation of cognition into increasingly automated protocols of behavioral enactment and algorithmically determined self-consideration prompts refusals to commit to particular modes of operating in the city. Concrete courses of action taken or imagined often involve individuals spreading themselves across disparate “projects” or engagements, hedging their bets, pluralizing possible destinations and sources of income. In one sense this is the very dissipation of an integrative subjectivity cultivated by neoliberal logics of flexible labor, where value is placed on resilience and a willingness to persist through contradictions. On the other hand, such individual tactical maneuvers opt for the construction of a self-visibility more effectively insulated from scrutiny. In some instances, detachment from steady contractual labor is a means of forging a relational autonomy, where mobility is linked to sustaining particular experiences of sociality or relations of care (Millar 2014).

Here, there may be much that can be garnered from the ascendancy of logistics as a mode of circulation and articulation. While we think of logistics as a matter of constructing the seamless transmission of commodities across discrete territories, youth are also faced with the exigencies of “transporting” themselves across intensely differentiated environments and protocols, which require a continuous detachment of their understandings and performances from the contexts in which they may be most familiar and comfortable.

In cities that seemingly demand youth to put themselves on the map, to incessantly communicate their ideas and feelings, or to enhance their visibility everywhere, many of the youth we talked with seemed to want not to disappear but to be enjoined in collective endeavors where “nothing seemed to be going on” and thus did not demand the intensities of labor, obligation, and reciprocity, nor the anxieties about failure and expendability that otherwise informed their sense of what was needed for them to survive. They may, on the one hand, make highly visible efforts to succeed and stylize themselves in particular ways. But even then, these efforts seem to be deployed as a way to recede into something more virtual, into a condition where anything might take place, where instability is embraced as a critical strategic maneuver.

As Guy Standing (2014) indicates, the varying instantiations of globalized neoliberal operations cultivate the norm of instability, both in work and in life in general. These are the conditions that generate a precariat as a class in the making. Not only do such individuals have limited access to steady jobs and professions, but also they have limited access to any condition associated with stability – in terms of either employment, residence, or citizenship. Precarity is the active transformation of people and practices into a state of nonexistence – rendering people and their lives invisible and irrelevant even if the fact of their presence endures (Santos 2001). While there are many arguments that dispute the distinctiveness of the precariat from long-term conditions of labor exploitation (Munck 2013; Shukaitis 2013; Bhattacharya 2014), the systematic erosion of the capacities of place-based networks to create value, solidarity, and relational economies clearly introduces a significant form of deprivation for which no form of labor organization can compensate.

In situations where work increasingly has to be pieced together in the interstices of once highly differentiated production logics, now bleeding into each other as a plurality of mutant hybrids providing various forms of compensation and enforcing compliance through generalized insecurity, how do youth maintain their convictions in a viable urban future? What can they imagine and do to understand what they are up against and what it is possible to do given the situations they face? The remainder of this discussion will focus on some of the practices deployed by some youth in Jakarta and Hyderabad to navigate an urban milieu that seems to be simultaneously replete with precariousness and possibility. I need to emphasize that this is a preliminary discussion in that it has yet to engage a substantial literature on urban youth in Asia.

Crafting

The capacity of individuals to resiliently become many different things has become standard operating procedure and, as such, individuals repeatedly experience the very conditions that constitute the presuppositions for human experience in general (Virno 2009). Of course, the relative absence of anchoring cultures, discourses, and norms does not open up complete freedom, and instead ushers in a flood of guidelines, instructions, pointers, expectations, and indicators whose applicability is for the moment, and then altered quickly.

But this is why the crafting of performance is now so crucial – for it concedes the perceived inefficacy of planning and preparation but also wards off the temptation to pursue wholesale conversions of the self, and its preoccupations with millennial movements, trickery, or redemption. In crafting there is the recognition of a sought-for instrumentality, of the ability to accomplish something through composition, through piecing together different styles, influences, and skills to gain access to specific opportunities.

Dimas, age 25, has had six jobs in the past three years after completing a technical high school diploma in automotive engineering in Jakarta. He has worked as office boy, ATM repairperson, telephonic credit card validator, restaurant waiter, motorbike taxi driver, and administrative assistant for a newspaper.

I started getting work when I was in Bojong station (a peri-urban area of Jakarta), after I was graduated from secondary school. I was hanging out in the station everyday with the same clothes, walking up and down trying to figure out what I was going to do. Someone approached and offered me a job: “Do you want to work?” I asked, “What kind of work?”. He replied, “Do you want to work or not, let’s apply as office boy. You can join me, I take care for it today”. And I explained to him, “But I don’t have any diploma”, and he said, “You don’t need a diploma”. When I arrived, the house manager and her sister were calling me. I did not know that I would work for ibu Shinta (the wife of Abdul Wahid, a former president of Indonesia). I got into the house manager’s room; she was called Bunda. I was asked if I really want to work. I convinced her that I really want to work. If I don’t want it, I would not be there. She explained that the salary was not that m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: engaging the city and the future
• PART I Precarity
• PART II Displacement and mobility
• PART III Security and insecurity
• PART IV Environment and sustainability
• PART V Citizenship, rights, and social justice
• PART VI Built environment and spatial governance
• PART VII Financialization and privatization
• PART VIII Heritage preservation and cultural expression
• Index