ABSTRACT In this article, I draw on multi‐sited and remote ethnography in the cities of Munich in Germany and Hanoi in Vietnam to analyze how young hip hop artists transform cities as sensory contact zones through rap and dance. I show how young Vietnamese‐Germans amplify sensory contact zones in the diasporic city of Munich through the sounds, visuals, and wordplay of Viet rap. In the rap track “Viet World Wide,” three rappers negotiate their dual modes of belonging and their “diasporic citizenship” while performing in the city where they live. I examine the sensations and affective resonances produced by dancing together in the cipher, a circular dance formation that is characteristic of diverse hip hop dance styles, such as breaking, popping, locking, waacking, or hip hop dance. By joining in and dancing together, young women in Hanoi generate feelings of joy and safety in an otherwise anonymous urban environment. By examining the city through the lens of sensory contact zones, I show how sounds and rhythms affect and animate urbanites' sense of place and belonging in the city.
ABSTRACT Urban security interventions often seek legitimacy by changing how places associated with violence are publicly represented. Less attention has been paid to how grassroots organizations navigate these representational pressures as they pursue everyday peace. This article examines that problem in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro, where the Pacifying Police Unit programme combined militarized policing with broader promises of social integration and urban renewal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2015, the article develops the concept of the dilemma of representation to analyze how grassroots actors navigate competing pressures over what aspects of favela life should be made visible. It compares one organization that documented police abuse and ongoing insecurity to contest official narratives of pacification with another that foregrounded culture, exchange, and everyday life to challenge stigma and build relationships beyond the favela. The article argues that representational decisions are themselves a key component of everyday peace practice, and that highly visible interventions can sharpen disagreements over what should be made visible and to what ends.
ABSTRACT Urban scholarship increasingly recognizes that processes such as gentrification unfold not only through spatial transformations, but through shifts in sensory environments and everyday rhythms. In this paper, drawing on twenty‐three months of fieldwork in Belgrade, I examine how urban redevelopment (re)organizes time for middle‐class people aged 25–45 through the regulation of nightlife, whereby noise ordinances prioritize quiet nights for newly affluent residents. To describe the displacement of nocturnal social life from the city center, I develop the concept of the sanitization of the night . Using sonic methods, interviews, and focus groups, I trace how gentrification reshapes Belgrade's soundscape as nightlife moves toward the suburbs. For urbanites who anchored their social lives in central districts, this shift produces a temporal disorientation embodied in insomnia. Finally, I argue that gentrification in Belgrade operates through a temporal displacement, where the governance of sound reorganizes when and how the city can be inhabited.
This article introduces the concept of "liminal nostalgia" to explore urban millennials' attachments to internet caf & eacute;s in China. Initially stigmatized as sites of gaming addiction leading to personal failure, these places are being reshaped by the civilizing agenda of urban renewal. Focusing ethnographically on a regional city in Hebei Province, I trace a group of local millennials who grew up immersed in internet caf & eacute;s and are geographically immobile. While existing literature often frames urban nostalgia as a reconstruction or critical acceptance of past identities, I argue that focusing on individuals' suspended identity offers a more productive understanding. In adulthood, local working-class regulars who continue to frequent internet caf & eacute;s are positioned in a liminal status by multiple social expectations-including national discourses, local moral standards, and personal commitments to upward mobility. As a result, I reveal that nostalgic emotion possesses an anti-structural dimension-critically embracing the past while facing a fatalistic impotence towards unrealized possibilities. Ultimately, by examining the transformation of internet caf & eacute; spaces within urban renewal, this study reveals the affective entanglement between place nostalgia, masculinity, and thwarted social mobility.
This article examines Northeast Ohio's transformation from an industrial hub, once known as the rubber capital of the world, into a "biomedical corridor," which has been experienced as particularly disruptive by community members. This disruption stems largely from the loss of employment and the emergence of new forms of racial inequality that directly affect both emotional and physical well-being. I theorize decay as a form of vitalism, representing the affective experience of unemployment, the experience of policing, the movement of crime, environmental effects of privatization and industrial decline, the physical decay of households, and the difficulty of holding families together. Furthermore, I explore how the experience of decay unfolds in the shift from an industrial economy to a privatized biomedical corridor, as residents confront the cumulative effects of urban displacement, waste, aging, and chronic illness amid the absence of meaningful employment opportunities and the limited capacity of hospitals to absorb the unemployed workforce. Despite structural barriers, many continue to imagine new futures and draw on the region's vibrant industrial past as a new politics of hate emerges amid shrinking welfare provisions.
This article examines how two grassroots street artists in Hong Kong, the King of Kowloon (Tsang Tsou-choi) and the Plumber King (Yim Chiu-tong), intervene in the city's everyday visual order. Moving beyond celebratory collective memory narratives and easy analogies to graffiti, it frames their works as subversive urban practices that rework regimes of visibility through which authority and capital are spatialized. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, the article develops "knockoff" as an analytic lens, arguing that the subversiveness of Tsang's and Yim's practices lies in their strategic mimicry of dominant visual languages and their tactical engagements with the urban landscape. Through these knockoff tactics, they produce vernacular claims to territory, recognition, and belonging that illuminate urban inequality and the contested boundaries of power in a late-capitalist, postcolonial city. The article thus locates the possibility for an art of resistance emerging from grassroots street practices that confront unequal urban visual regimes through the city's ordinary surfaces and circulations.
Urban studies have tended to locate middle-class urbanism in formally planned neighborhoods, while self-built settlements are typically analyzed through frameworks of informality and poverty. This article challenges that dichotomy based on 5 years of ethnographic research in neighborhoods of informal origin in Bogot & aacute;, Colombia. I argue that in these contexts middle-class identities emerge through what I term aspirational materialities-transformations of the domestic and neighborhood environment that express projects of social mobility. Practices of building, expanding, and beautifying homes-including vertical expansion, finished fa & ccedil;ades, garages, and security devices-function not only as architectural improvements but also as means of producing social distinctions. The article brings together approaches to symbolic boundaries with the anthropology of space and materiality to analyze spatial-material boundary work, through which residents use the built environment to claim recognition and respectability. First, I examine how everyday evaluations of fa & ccedil;ade "improvements" morally classify neighbors according to notions of effort, discipline, and neglect. Second, I show how residents mobilize the city's socio-spatial imaginary to claim an intermediate position between the "poor" and the "elite," turning urban geography into evidence of status. The article contributes to debates on middle classes in the Global South by showing how class is constructed through material and spatial practices of distinction in contexts of inequality.
In Zurich, Switzerland's largest and wealthiest city, future planning around densification has been intensely debated in recent years, spurring referendums and direct democratic votes, and permeating the public discourse through governmental communication, political propaganda, and heightened media coverage. As I argue, densification has pervaded the city beyond the technical realm of planning itself, trickling precisely into the everyday realms of the affective, embodied, and sensed, fleshing out gendered and racialized anticipatory imaginaries. This paper thus draws from critical urban studies as well as queer and affect theory to look at densification as a sensed future imaginary, often articulated to prevent its actual materialization: a phenomenon described in this article as "preventive sensations." Drawing on ethnographic work with civil society organizations, urban activism, and far-right politics, the paper asks how the density of a city comes to be and most of all felt, even when it has arguably yet to arise. By demonstrating how Switzerland emerges as a historically urbaphobic context, I argue that crowdedness becomes a smokescreen for nationalism and anti-migration sentiments, evoked in both conservative and progressive agendas.
Urban theorists increasingly resort to the language of multiplicity when describing cities, particularly Southeast Asian metropolises like Jakarta, Indonesia. Cities, they argue, are composed of worlds within worlds, fragments that fail to cohere into a whole. This is a useful model, but it fails to account for the felt specificity of a particular place and time. Every city has a distinct atmosphere that separates it from elsewhere and which itself cannot easily be defined. This photo essay uses a sensory medium, that is, photography, to evoke the felt atmosphere on the streets of Jakarta. It explores the potential of photography to reveal something of the feeling a place produces without reducing it to any singular set of circumstances or conditions. Photography, it demonstrates, can operate as a nonreductive mode of apprehending, a way of depicting the flurry of activity that produces worlds, without defining or confining the boundaries of those worlds.
The article examines the lasting effects of squatting in Rome by tracing how its political and pedagogical legacies persist long after eviction. While the physical removal of individuals from a space is often considered the defining moment of eviction, it is, in reality, only the culmination of a lengthy and complex social and legal process-one whose consequences continue to unfold far beyond the moment of displacement. Although squatting is often understood as politically transformative, little attention has been paid to the forms of agency it cultivates and how these endure after unhoming. Drawing on feminist and anthropological approaches, the article introduces agentic homemaking as a relational practice shaped through collective dwelling and shared political struggle. Through the life stories of two former squatters, it shows how people confront unhoming by mobilizing care, mutual aid, and learned knowledge to resist structural inequalities and rebuild their lives. The article also advances the concept of extended squatting time to highlight the enduring influence of squatting as a lived pedagogy that produces marginalized forms of knowledge central to urban politics and everyday survival. Together, these concepts foreground overlooked forms of agency that emerge in the aftermath of dispossession, offering new perspectives on urban struggle, relational resilience, and future-making.
This article examines the work of a Blackfoot-led, volunteer-based outreach organization that patrols the urban core of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, providing support and connection to vulnerable community members. While settler colonialism maintains exclusionary racialized geographies which locate cities as spaces of "Whiteness" and reserves as places of "Indianness," SAGE Clan challenges these divisions by patrolling the urban core and providing supports and aid to people experiencing homelessness and addiction. In so doing, it marks its presence on the landscape, asserting an enduring Indigenous connection to ancestral Blackfoot territory. Further, through their concept of Niitsitapiikimmapiiyipitssinni, which understands being Niitsitapi (the Real People) as not tied to blood or ancestry, but embracing a responsibility for mutual care, patrollers challenge neoliberal values of individualism and self-reliance-values echoed in Western medicalized addiction treatment programs-and suggest that being or becoming Niitsitapi is open to all who choose to walk with SAGE Clan and embrace a way of life premised on care and empathy. We suggest that by asserting that all citizens have a role to play in assisting vulnerable community members, and framing Niitsitapi values as open to all, SAGE Clan challenges racial divisions which uphold settler colonialism, articulating a pathway to reconciliation [Urban Indigeneity; Settler colonialism; Addiction; Racialized Geographies; Reconciliation].
The article tackles the emerging issue of urban bordering by exploring its racializing and securitizing discourses and practices. These frame minoritized subjects as evictable, contributing to the gentrification of their areas of shelter and refuge. The key processes of contemporary urban governance are examined in the neighborhood of Exarchia in central Athens, Greece, an area of great political and historical significance for anti-authoritarian struggles, solidarity, and social justice initiatives. In recent years, the area has faced extensive gentrification through touristification and militarization, as well as the eviction of several political squats hosting migrants and antiauthoritarian Greek activists. As part of a research project examining the underexplored political cost of gentrification, this article exposes and analyses dispossession strategies in the area through the production of 'suspect' population groups, and the mobilization of 'race' and 'criminality'. It thus aims to contribute to decolonial understandings of mobilization of race within contemporary urban processes beyond the US context, and to recent studies on the criminalization of dissent.
Urban theorists increasingly resort to the language of multiplicity when describing cities, particularly Southeast Asian metropolises like Jakarta, Indonesia. Cities, they argue, are composed of worlds within worlds, fragments that fail to cohere into a whole. This is a useful model, but it fails to account for the felt specificity of a particular place and time. Every city has a distinct atmosphere that separates it from elsewhere and which itself cannot easily be defined. This photo essay uses a sensory medium, that is, photography, to evoke the felt atmosphere on the streets of Jakarta. It explores the potential of photography to reveal something of the feeling a place produces without reducing it to any singular set of circumstances or conditions. Photography, it demonstrates, can operate as a nonreductive mode of apprehending, a way of depicting the flurry of activity that produces worlds, without defining or confining the boundaries of those worlds.
This article discusses the “Dragon Walk” project, a series of guided walks and participatory art-based community gatherings purposefully located in one of Vancouver's major redevelopment landscapes, the Cambie Corridor. Adopting a “cats' cradle” approach to thinking and writing, I follow Dragon Walk's suggestion that we look at urban change from a circuitous route—one informed by performative, imaginative, and sensuous practices. I argue that by activating sensorial sites of encounters between human and more-than-human city inhabitants, Dragon Walk reveals some of the paradoxes of urban growth and points out a chasm between what is being envisioned in city projects and what redevelopment looks and feels like on the ground. Dragon Walk shows that so far, redevelopment on this major corridor has not been able to create more affordable, inclusive, or vibrant urban forms and urges us to pay attention to the stalled times of ruination and housing precarity. In this process, it questions an understanding of urban change modeled on growth, forward temporality, and the city as a human-centered built environment.
Since 2017, social housing activists from the Reclaim the City movement have occupied and repaired a formerly abandoned, apartheid-era hospital in Woodstock, one of Cape Town's rapidly gentrifying central neighborhoods. In the face of recurring threats of mass eviction and a lack of affordable, well-located social housing alternatives, it has become Cape Town's most prominent and politically contested building occupation. This article focuses on a co-design initiative that has emerged from within the occupation, in collaboration with allied community architects and civil society facilitators. In the article, I argue that the initiative added another negotiating tool and layer of resistance for creatively opposing vilification, discrimination, and displacement. Foregrounding the initiative's co-designed architectural models, collective imaginaries, and operative scales, the article critically interrogates how the movement's co-design initiative complemented ongoing repair practices, and how and whether these complementary activist repertoires could create viable avenues for improved living conditions within this politically hard-won activist space. The article contributes to urban anthropological research on architecture, design, and movement practices aimed at the broader goal of rebuilding and repairing existing communities in the context of Cape Town's historically most divided socio-spatial segregation. Throughout the article, I discuss "design" and "repair" as urban political sensibilities, distinct yet connected modalities of creative resistance, that operated as complementary tactics in defense of the occupation.
This article discusses the "Dragon Walk" project, a series of guided walks and participatory art-based community gatherings purposefully located in one of Vancouver's major redevelopment landscapes, the Cambie Corridor. Adopting a "cats' cradle" approach to thinking and writing, I follow Dragon Walk's suggestion that we look at urban change from a circuitous route-one informed by performative, imaginative, and sensuous practices. I argue that by activating sensorial sites of encounters between human and more-than-human city inhabitants, Dragon Walk reveals some of the paradoxes of urban growth and points out a chasm between what is being envisioned in city projects and what redevelopment looks and feels like on the ground. Dragon Walk shows that so far, redevelopment on this major corridor has not been able to create more affordable, inclusive, or vibrant urban forms and urges us to pay attention to the stalled times of ruination and housing precarity. In this process, it questions an understanding of urban change modeled on growth, forward temporality, and the city as a human-centered built environment.
In Kingston, Jamaica, decades of high crime coupled with the failure of the state to effectively provide public security have given rise to a booming private security industry. In this landscape, middle- and upper-class residents have turned to electronic security technologies to fortify their homes against the threat of a home intrusion. In this article, I focus on the Intrusion Detection System (IDS), a widely used electronic security system in Kingston. Attuned to threats through the mobilization of haptic, kinaesthetic, and thermoceptive capabilities, the IDS presents an alternate vision of urban security-that is, one not tethered to the primacy of the electronic gaze. In considering the discourse of electronic security providers and middle-class residents who live in gated enclosures, I interrogate the IDS as an extra-sensory sentinel assemblage and as a critical urban actor. Doing so reveals, I argue, how the IDS is changing how the risk/crime of a home intrusion is being temporally, spatially, and relationally anticipated and experienced both within and beyond the fortified domestic sphere. This article highlights the importance of integrating non-human and non-visual sensorialities into discussions of security in high-crime urban contexts.
This article situates fitness spaces in Kampala, Uganda as sites of an emergent form of urban relationality, what I term "renegade relationality." Renegade relationality is transgressive in that it creates both discursive and material relationships that challenge existing social and economic practices. This article charts a series of ethnographic examples of renegade relationality that illustrate its transgressive potential, including new forms of public debate, female-support networks, and networks of redistribution. Key to the transgressive nature of renegade relationality is the formation of fitness spaces as sites of social exception. The social obligations and norms that mediate sociality in other urban spaces are often temporarily suspended within fitness spaces. I locate the formation of fitness spaces as sites of social exception as part of the fitness industry's co-constitution with convergent neoliberal processes in Kampala. Tracing the ways that fitness is implicated in both neoliberal processes of urbanization as well as new discursive registers of self-responsibility suggests that renegade relationality exists not just in spite of neoliberalism, but because of it. In this way, I offer renegade relationality as an unexpected urban excess of neoliberalism, one that might draw attention to the transgressive and even progressive byproducts of the neoliberal era.
