Fixed in Mobility: Young Homeless People and the City

This article draws attention to a controversial activity in poor urban neighborhoods. Slum tourism is a growing business worldwide and simultaneously it is a new form of encounter between the global South and the global North. Following the new mobilities paradigm, I investigate a particular form of slum tourism, which intertwines urban poverty and charity, representation and powerful imaginaries, tourist mobility and transnational lifestyles. This is the case in Mazatlán, Mexico, where a multidenominational church offers regular tours to the city's garbage dump. I scrutinize the various modes of (im)mobilities and their implications for peoples and places, interconnecting spheres which are conceived of as separate. In conclusion, I outline the ambiguous effects when marginalized spaces become integral parts of the urban representation. Résumé Cet article attire l’attention sur une activité discutable qui se déroule dans les quartiers urbains pauvres. Un tourisme de la misère se développe dans tous les pays et, parallèlement, constitue un type original de confrontation Nord‐Sud. Le nouveau modèle de la mobilité permet d’étudier une forme particulière de ‘tourisme des bidonvilles’, qui mêle étroitement pauvreté urbaine et charité, représentation et imaginaires profonds, mobilité des touristes et styles de vie transnationaux. C’est le cas à Mazatlán, au Mexique, où une Église multiconfessionnelle propose régulièrement des excursions à la décharge municipale. Les divers modes de mobilités et d’immobilités, ainsi que leurs implications pour les populations et les lieux, sont étudiés en interconnectant des sphères qui sont censées être séparées. La conclusion expose brièvement les effets ambigus lorsque des espaces marginalisés deviennent des parties intégrantes de la représentation urbaine.

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 74%

Urban Poverty, Spatial Representation and Mobility: Touring a Slum in Mexico

Dürr

2012

“…By ‘mobilizing’ housing through the use of movement frames such as ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘self‐determination’, Movement for Justice in El Barrio expands the amount of power they have to determine for themselves when they will be mobile and when not , as well as the form this mobility will take — opting to raise funds through international social movement networks rather than accepting eviction. This ostensible dichotomy of needing to become mobile in order to resist mobility highlights the point made by Massey (1993) and also by Jackson (2012) that the analytical question is not: Are poor people mobile or not? or How mobile are they?…”

Section: Conclusion: Housing As a Global Bridgementioning

confidence: 92%

Mobilizing to Stay Put: Housing Struggles in New York City

Maeckelbergh

2012

This article examines how housing becomes a basis for mobilization that brings residents in East Harlem, New York City into internationally mobile social movement networks. These networks foster the mobility of people, practices and ideas to transform ‘housing’ from an immobile practice into a mobile, shifting entity experienced as tenuous, a counterfactual demand for immobility, and an expression of a shared desire for self‐determination. Through mobilizing frames that turn the demand for decent housing into a struggle against neoliberalism, gentrification and displacement, and for collective self‐determination, housing struggles create multi‐scale networks of mobility that are essential to pursuing a neighborhood‐level struggle to stay put. Résumé Le logement est à la base d'une mobilisation des New‐yorkais de East Harlem qui les a fait entrer dans des réseaux de mouvements sociaux mobiles à l'échelon international. Ces réseaux favorisent la mobilité des individus, des pratiques et des idées de sorte que le ‘logement’ ne soit plus une expérience immobile, mais une entité variable mobile vécue comme précaire, une demande virtuelle d'immobilité et l'expression d'un désir commun d'autodétermination. En passant par des cadres de mobilisation qui transforment la demande de logement décent en un combat à la fois contre le néolibéralisme, la gentrification et les déménagements forcés, et pour une autodétermination collective, les luttes liées au logement créent des réseaux de mobilitéà plusieurs échelons, indispensables à la résistance des habitants qui ne veulent pas quitter leur quartier.

“…Emma Jackson's account (2012, this issue) of the lives of homeless youth in London clearly exemplifies the power play over mobility in public space. The youngsters in her study demonstrate a high degree of mobility and in fact use mobility as a resource, but at the same time their movements are restricted by a number of actors in the urban arena.…”

Section: Differential Mobilities and Mobilizing Differencementioning

confidence: 99%

Mobilities and Mobilizations of the Urban Poor

Jaffe

Klaufus²,

Colombijn

2012

This introduction sets out the aims of the symposium on mobilities and mobilizations of the urban poor. Exploring the physical, social and imagined movements of the poor into, within and out of cities, and addressing how these movements connect to the dynamics of urban social mobilization, it argues for an incorporation of the 'mobility turn' in studies of the urban poor. The introduction proposes a number of relevant themes within this approach, starting with increased attention to the interconnections between physical and imaginative movements. This is followed by a discussion of representations of mobility and mobile representations: the ways in which physicalThis symposium explores the physical, social and imagined movements of the poor into, within and out of cities and addresses how these movements connect to the dynamics of urban social mobilization. The six articles presented here are the product of an international conference organized in September 2009 in Leiden, the Netherlands, in honor of the retiring urban anthropologist Peter J.M. Nas. The conference brought to light a number of cross-cultural insights that have been further elaborated for this symposium. The authors study the ways in which urban space is imagined and how this connects to the spatialization of the networks of the urban poor, both within and beyond cities. The contributors analyze instances when the urban poor coalesce to become visible, as well as when they strategically remain invisible, in both a physical and a symbolic sense. The articles start from the idea that, in a globalized world, virtual forms of travel and alliance can supplement or even replace physical movement. Following Cresswell (2010: 19), we understand mobilities here as the entanglement of three aspects: 'the fact of physical movement -getting from one place to another; the representations of movement that give it shared meaning; and, finally, the experienced and embodied practice of movement'. Physical movement can be taken as the 'raw material' from which mobilities are produced. A mobilities approach to migration, for instance, entails not only a study of the physical movement of people between and across places, but also entails considering the popular and official representations of these movements and the embodied practices involved. Virtual movement refers to the forms of communication, alliance and exchange enabled through the circulation of images and information. We see mobilization as the process, central to the formation of political actors, of making resources (such as manpower, money, information or images) available for the collective making of claims (Tilly and Tarrow, 2006: 74). By analyzing the flows, networks and imaginaries that influence possibilities for physical movement and social mobilization across and beyond the city, this symposium aims to share some fresh theoretical insights on the relationship between im/mobility and urban poverty. The rapid growth of the world's urban population over the past decades has spurred social scientists ...