This special issue focuses on urban marginality in diverse contexts across the world (Africa, Latin America, Arab States and Europe) and proposes anthropological perspectives on contemporary urbanity that take into account the complexity of the social positions of those city dwellers that are on the margins. Three aspects of urban margins come to the fore. First, urbanites respond to increasing marginalisation through the production of alternative meanings and narratives about the city. While grand, powerful narratives may present cities as 'divided', 'dual' or 'conflicted', urban dwellers may carve out symbolic space through discourses of the non-spectacular and non-political, emerging out of lived space. Second, the cuts and frictions constituting urban margins do not only limit urban dwellers capacities, but can also provide spaces of agentic possibilities. As it is well known, the absence of state control can be turned by versatile urbanites into opportunities of the 'informal' economy. Third, urban dwellers engage in manifold practices that connect and entangle their marginalised position with spaces of power and resources. Through their practices urban margins become a relation to, not a disconnection from the 'centre'. In this special issue we understand 'urban margins' not as essence or entities, but as forms of relations between urban dwellers shaped by processes of political, economic, spatial and social marginalisation. Seen in this way, urban margins constitute a perspective on the urban: a lens to entice comparisons of urban agency in the world of cities [
The many studies that see shopping malls as places of power, control and exclusion have often neglected the potential of malls as places of encounters. Drawing on ethnographic data from the divided cities of Johannesburg in South Africa and Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina, we examine the ways in which urban dwellers who enter the mall from a marginalised positionpoor black urban dwellers at a regional, middle class and whitedominated mall in Johannesburg and Bosniak city dwellers at a mall located in the Croat part of Mostaruse the mall, what kind of relations they build to others and how they rework boundaries of race, class, religion and ethnicity at the mall. Rather than being spaces that strengthen and reproduce centre-margins relations, urban dwellers appropriate them as places where these relations become reworked.
PurposeThe purpose of the article is to present some preliminary findings and discussions points from a symposium on Public Outdoor Spaces and COVID-19 organised in Wageningen, The Netherlands, in June 2021.Design/methodology/approachThe article argues for a salutogenic perspective on infrastructure planning and design, dealing with the interplay between the ideas and practices of infrastructure planning and design and the outcomes of those ideas and practices for health.FindingsWithin that perspective, the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis is seen as an opportunity to revive the importance of infrastructure in promoting health and well-being.Originality/valueThe salutogenic approach adds a much-needed new perspective on infrastructure planning and design, and also involves challenges both in research and practice, for the application of holistic principles to the design of new environments.
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