This essay examines the influence of uncertainty on how contemporary cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited. This influence is demonstrated through the analysis of various domains of urban planning and governance (disaster, security, energy, and transportation) across four cities of the global South (Bogotá, Karachi, Accra, and Johannesburg). In each city, uncertainty is produced by historical conditions and productive of future possibilities.
How does risk become a technique for governing the future of cities and urban life?Using genealogical and ethnographic methods, this article tracks the emergence of risk management in Bogotá, Colombia, from its initial institutionalization to its ongoing implementation in governmental practice. Its specific focus is the invention of the "zone of high risk" in Bogotá and the everyday work performed by the officials responsible for determining the likelihood of landslide in these areas. It addresses the ongoing formation of techniques of urban planning and governance and the active relationship of urban populations and environments to emerging forms of political authority and technical expertise. Ultimately, it reveals that techniques of risk management are made and remade as experts and non-experts grapple with the imperative to bring heterogeneous assemblages of people and things into an unfolding technopolitical domain.2
This essay offers a methodological intervention into conceptual debates in urban studies. Despite significant analytical and political differences across an otherwise heterodox field of inquiry, these debates have been overly confined to a theoretical register. In this essay, I propose an alternative, inspired by Stuart Hall, which focuses on the concrete work accomplished by our key concepts in specific historical conjunctures. I make this argument with reference to my own research in Colombia, focusing specifically on racialized violence and displacement in the port‐city of Buenaventura. I argue that Hall's method, particularly his work on ‘race’, offers a way to engage questions of global urbanism without necessarily treating them as theoretical questions. Like ‘race’ in Hall's analysis, concepts like the ‘urban’ and the ‘global’ are ‘articulating principles’ of social formations, producing both discursive and material effects, and possessing social, cultural and political lives of their own. Alongside efforts to democratize the privilege of thinking and speaking in the language of ‘theory’, Hall's method exposes that privilege to more fundamental questioning.
What happens when the rights of urban citizens are reconfigured by the biopolitical imperative to protect life from threats? I examine such situations by focusing on how the emergence of risk as a technique of government shapes urban politics in Bogotá, Colombia. Investigating the frames of political engagement within which claims for recognition, inclusion, and entitlement are made, I argue that it is within the domain of biopolitical security that poor and vulnerable populations engage in relationships with the state.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted aboard a cargo boat on Colombia’s Magdalena River, and on historical accounts of fluvial transport, this article examines the racial formations on which logistics depends. Logistics is organized around flows at the heart of capitalist modernity, which are made possible by labour regimes whose racial underpinnings have both persisted and changed over time. Tracking continuities and divergences in riverboat work along the Magdalena River, I propose that our understanding of logistics is enriched by attending to historical articulations of race and labour. Inspired by scholars who reckon with the afterlives of racial slavery as well as by those who track precisely how that legacy unfolds in geographically and historically situated ways, I propose the analytic of situated afterlives, which focuses attention on the persistence of racial hierarchies and on their perpetual instability.
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