Space,

Place, Society + Power

:: Guest lecture ::

Urban Spaces,
Politics, Citizenship

YiEn, Cheng (Dr)
Researcher, National University of Singapore

Lecture Outline: Urban spaces, politics, citizenship

Aim: Examine how urban politics are played out in spaces, and how
urban citizens negotiate, transgress, and lay claims in/through spaces


Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space
(a) Politics of identities
(b) Migration and superdiversity
(c) Im/mobilities and politics of speed/slowness

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices
(a) Urban citizen as P/p-olitical
(b) Everyday civic spaces: conviviality, multiculturalism

Urban spaces, politics, citizenship

Whats the deal with urban politics?

Premises:
- Cities are spatial organisations, therefore product of power relations

- Cities are contested spatial projects, not Fixed, shifts over time and
space

- Whose urban aspirations? On whose terms do cities come into being?


Becoming urban on whose terms? (Friedmann reading)
On whose terms should the city be planned?
Whose rights should have priority?

Urban spaces, politics, citizenship

[right to the city] should modify, concretize and make more practical the
rights of the citizen as an urban dweller (citadin) and user of multiple
services. It would afFirm, on the one hand, the right of users to make
known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in the urban
area; it would also cover the right to the use of the center, a privileged
place, instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos (for workers,
immigrants, the marginal and even for the privileged)
-- Lefebvre, H., The Right to the City. trans.


Urban dwellers/inhabitants/citizens should have:
(i) Right to participation: shifting arena of decision-making away from
the state and toward the production of urban space.
(ii) Right to appropriation: urban inhabitants to physically access,
occupy, and use urban space + produce urban space for their needs

Urban spaces, politics, citizenship

Who are these urban dwellers? Who can legitimately claim right to
the city?


Because the right to the city revolves around the production of urban
space, it is those who live in the city who contribute to the body of
urban lived experience and lived space who can legitimately claim the
right to the city. [] Under the right to the city, membership in the
community of enfranchised people is not an accident of nationality or
ethnicity or birth; rather it is earned by living out the routines of
everyday life in the space of the city. (Purcell, 2002: 102)


Purcell, M. 2002. Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant.
Geojournal, 58: 99-108.

Urban spaces, politics, citizenship

BUT not just anyone who contribute to the body of urban lived
experience and lived space


So the agenda that inhabitants will pursue cannot be presumed; rather it
must be negotiated through a complex politics of scale, identity, and
difference, among other struggles. [] Because a range of political
identities will deFine urban inhabitants, a range of political interests may
animate their agenda. The result is likely to be the pursuit of
heterogeneous and hybrid urban geographies, all of which nevertheless
share in common a city produced to meet the complex and multiple
needs of urban inhabitants. (Purcell, 2002: 106)

Lecture Outline: Urban spaces, politics, citizenship

Aim: Examine how urban politics are played out in spaces, and how
urban citizens negotiate, transgress, and lay claims in/through spaces


Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space
(a) Politics of identities
(b) Migration and superdiversity
(c) Im/mobilities and politics of speed/slowness

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Politics of identities

Urban inhabitants are embodied, living out a range of identities
(nationality, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, dis/ability etc.),
therefore claims and uses of urban spaces inFlected through a politics of
identities

Attention to politics of identities forces us to ask: Whose rights? Whose
city? Becoming urban on whose terms? (Friedmann reading)

Identities are not only marked onto bodies-as-spaces, but also acted out
and inscribed into urban spaces, forms, and environments, as bodies
dwell and move in/across cities

Politics of identities manifest in urban landscapes:
- Highly visible: ethnic enclaves, super-rich enclaves (Pow reading)
- Spectacles/Iconic: London Eye, Gardens by the Bay, Merlion

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Politics of identities

- But also everyday, less-spectacular, mundane spaces

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Politics of identities

Classed urban spaces
the role of the aesthetic in the politics of exclusion and urban
segregation in post-Socialist Shanghai where the restructuring and
commodiFication of erstwhile public welfare housing have led to the
rapid development of private middle-class gated enclaves.

Pow, C-P 2009. Neoliberalism and the aestheticization of the new middle-class
landscapes. Antipode, 41(2): 371-390.

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Politics of identities

Classed urban spaces
Singapore equivalents?

Venice of Punggol
???

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Politics of identities

Aestheticization & Classed Education Landscape in Global City Singapore (?)

We stood a distance away from the crowded bus stop, beside a rubbish bin,
where we had a view of the front view of the campus. He lit a cigarette, took a
puff, and pointed in the direction of the campus. See how small our bloody
school is (from Chengs thesis)

We are like second-class of the lot, even our school facilities cannot make it. I
always visit my friends at U-Town, the place so beautiful (May, interviewee)

Global research universi7es

VS.
Private local colleges

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Politics of identities

Politics of age: youthful spaces

Public consump7on of alcohol; illegal

gathering

Can youthful play-capes be classed/racialised as well? Share you thoughts

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Politics of identities

Politics of age: youthful spaces

Can youthful play-scapes be classed/racialised?


Annette Lareau in Unequal Childhoods
Concerted cultivation as characteristic
of middle-class parenting (Lareau, 2002)


Instead of playing out, these children
are now increasingly likely to play in the home
and garden, with some being channeled into
Commercialized play spaces and supervised
clubs and activities (Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2014)

Sarah L. Holloway & Helena Pimlott-Wilson (2014) Enriching Children,
Institutionalizing Childhood? Geographies of Play, Extracurricular Activities, and
Parenting in England, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104:3, 613-627

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Politics of identities

Politics of age: ageing spaces

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Politics of identities

Politics of age: ageing spaces

Urban solutions for ageing population... public/private divide?

Politics of familyhood and care-taking in Singapore
grandparents, especially grandmothers, are and important resource in
caring for grandchildren
It is the reality that grandparents are left with no choice but to assume
the care of their grandchildren (Thang & Mehta, 2012)

Intersectionality across age and gender:
Gendered use of ageing spaces in the public?


(Thang L.L. and Mehta K.K., 2012)

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Migration and superdiversity


The global city as nexus for new politico-cultural
alignments (Saskia Sassen)

Global cities as sites of interlocking identities, values, norms, practices,
thereby bringing new challenges as well as political frontiers

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Migration and superdiversity

Politics of identities in global cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai,
New York, London etc. complicated by migration and transnational Flows

Urban spaces as sites of encounters between different social groups;
spaces for negotiating (an expansive notion of) diversity

Singapore (and other global cities):
- foreign talent
- low-skilled foreign workers
- female domestic workers
- marriage migrants (and their inter-cultural children)
- foreign students and their parents (peidu mama)

Beyond migrant diversity?
- New sexual citizens, religious identities, the list goes on

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Migration and superdiversity
Super-diversity is- a term intended to underline a level and kind of
complexity surpassing anything previously experienced in a particular
society. Over the past twenty years globally more people have moved
from more places to more places; wholly new and increasingly complex
social formations have ensued, marked by dynamic interplays of
variables, including: country of origin (comprising a variety of possible
subset traits such as ethnicity, language[s], religious tradition, regional
and local identities, cultural values and practices), migration
channel (often related to highly gendered Flows, speciFic social networks
and particular labour market niches), and legal status (including myriad
categories determining a hierarchy of entitlements and restrictions).

(Steven Vertovec, taken from
http://www.mmg.mpg.de/research/all-projects/super-diversity/ )

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Migration and superdiversity


How can city leaders and ofFicials possibly cope with a situation in which
the world in microcosm appears to have sprung up in their jurisdiction?
They have to cope as globalizations effects refract into a myriad small,
mundane, street corner issues that need sorting on a daily basis. (Wood
and Landry, 2007: 63)

In a world of increasing mobility, how people of

different cultures live together is a key issue of our
age, especially for those responsible for planning
and running cities. New thinking is needed on how
diverse communities can cooperate in productive
harmony instead of leading parallel or antagonistic
lives.

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: Migration and superdiversity


Food for thought


Can urban projects like intercultural city, multicultural city, and
cosmopolitan city be truly achieved?


What kinds of cities and urban futures can we aspire towards in an age of
super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007)?


- Who do we include in these urban projects? Who do we exclude?
- How to decide who has the right to participation and right to
appropriation?

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: im/mobilities and speed/slowness


Urban politics more than identities also mobilities


Mobility, and control over mobility, both reFlects and reinforces power.
It is not simply a question of unequal distribution, that some people
move more than others, and that some have more control than others. It
is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other
people. Differential mobility can weaken the leverage of the already
weak. The time space compression of some groups can undermine the
power of others. (Massey 1994: 150)

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: im/mobilities and speed/slowness


Migrant rights to mobilities

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: im/mobilities and speed/slowness

Everyday mundane mobilities: politics of time/speed

Indeed, in this city obsessed with reducing trafFic congestion, a speedy
commuteand its reward of shorter travel timesis not guaranteed to
all in Singapore. While some seamlessly traverse across town on roads
that are kept smooth-Flowing, others have to have their travels deferred,
brought forward in time, or rendered utterly unpredictable. This creation
of uneven tempos in the city, culminating in a diversity of urban
experiences (Lin, 2012: 2487)

Lin, W.Q. 2012. Wasting time? The differentiation of travel time in urban transport. Environment and
Planning A, 44(10): 2477-2492.

- Transport options are differentiated

- Emotions around waiting
- Broader urban politics (next)

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: im/mobilities and speed/slowness

Everyday mundane mobilities: politics of time/speed





Food for thought

Urban poli7cs in ci7es
like Singapore need to
also grasp with
natural heritage.

Urban diversi7es not just
about society, but also
Need to account for
nature.

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space

:: im/mobilities and speed/slowness

Everyday mundane mobilities: politics of time/speed


Mr Khaw said that the longer 9km route around the CCNR will incur an extra
travel time of 6 minutes, compared to the more direct 4km route that will go
under the nature reserve.

Suggesting that commuters have high expectations of train efFiciency, Mr Khaw
quipped that in a minute of delay, a commuter could post 100 times on Twitter to
"Flame" the Land Transport Authority and the rail operator.

The six minutes of extra travel time, he said, could not be simply "brushed aside".

Cross Island Line to have about 30 stations, with 600,000 trips made daily: Khaw, The Straits Times, 29
Feb 2016

Lecture Outline: Urban spaces, politics, citizenship

Aim: Examine how urban politics are played out in spaces, and how
urban citizens negotiate, transgress, and lay claims in/through spaces


Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space
(a) Politics of identities
(b) Migration and superdiversity
(c) Im/mobilities and politics of speed/slowness

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices
(a) Urban citizen as P/p-olitical
(b) Everyday civic spaces

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices

:: Urban citizen as P/p-olitical

From cities as sites of encounter to cities as difference machine +
spaces for invention, strategies, mobilisations, and making claims


The city is not a container where differences encounter each other; the
city generates differences and assembles identities. The city is a
difference machine insofar as it is understood as that space which is
constituted by the dialogical encounter of groups formed and generated
immanently in the process of taking up positions, orienting themselves
for and against each other, inventing and assembling strategies and
technologies, mobilizing various forms of capital, and making claims to
that space that is objectiFied as the city (Isin, 2002: 283)


Urban citizen as becoming, deFined through acts of citizenship;
production of urban space from below (i.e. non-state, ordinary people)

Urban spaces, politics, citizenship

Recap:

Because the right to the city revolves around the production of urban
space, it is those who live in the city who contribute to the body of
urban lived experience and lived space who can legitimately claim the
right to the city. [] Under the right to the city, membership in the
community of enfranchised people is not an accident of nationality or
ethnicity or birth; rather it is earned by living out the routines of
everyday life in the space of the city. (Purcell, 2002: 102)

Purcell, M. 2002. Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant.
Geojournal, 58: 99-108.

Urban citizen as becoming: not legal status nor prescribed category

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices

:: Urban citizen as P/p-olitical

Claiming urban citizenship in and through space: Occupy
movements, protests -> being overtly Political

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices

:: Urban citizen as P/p-olitical

Alternative ways of claiming urban citizenship in/through space ->
less overt, implicit kind of political

(Marginalised) urban citizenship-making often restrictive, bleeting, and
subject to re-surveillance and re-territorialisation by state
authorities (examples?)

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices

:: Urban citizen as P/p-olitical

Alternative ways of claiming urban citizenship in/through space ->
less overt, implicit kind of political


Neighbourhood activism (Jacobs reading)
there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might
call the natural proprietors of the street.

Citizen-led walk

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices

:: Everyday civic spaces

Civic Culture ala. Ash Amin (2008)

ethical practices in public space are formed precognitively
and reFlexively rather than rationally or consciously,
guided by routines of neurological response and material
practice, rather than by acts of human will.

the compulsion of civic virtue in urban public space stems from a
particular kind of spatial arrangement, when streets, markets, parks,
buses, town halls are marked by non-hierarchical relations, openness to
new inFluence and change, and a surfeit of diversity, so that the dynamic
of multiplicity or the promise of plenitude is allowed free reign.


Amin, A. 2008. Collective culture and urban public space, City, 12(1): 5-24.

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices

:: Everyday civic spaces

Everyday Conviviality



encounter in the street and neighbourhood, school

and workplace, park and square, is a crucial Filter of


social practice, affecting emotive, sensory, neurological

and intellectual response towards both immediate


others and the world at large. Conviviality is identiFied

as an important everyday virtue of living with

difference based on the direct experience of


multiculture, getting around the mainstream instinct to

deny minorities the right to be different or to require


sameness or conformity from them.





Taken from: http://www.publicspace.org/es/texto-biblioteca/eng/b003-collective-culture-and-urbanpublic-space

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices

:: Everyday civic spaces

Everyday Multiculturalism

a situated approach to understanding the everyday dimensions of
multiculturalism as it is lived. As opposed to policy-oriented
multiculturalism focused on group based rights, service provision and
legislation, the everyday multiculturalism perspective explores how
cultural diversity is experienced and negotiated on the ground in
everyday situations such as neighbourhoods, schools, and workplaces,
and how social relations and social actors identities are shaped and
reshaped in the process. (Wise and Veluyatham, 2009)




From http://compasanthology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/
Wise_COMPASMigrationAnthology.pdf

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices

:: Everyday civic spaces

Based on data from interviews, questionnaires and participant observation, this
article examines social exchanges and interactions within wet markets (meat,
Fish, fruits and vegetable markets) in Singapore. The types of social interactions
found in wet markets are wide-ranging and informal, and occur across different
ethnicities, generations, social statuses and classes; they can range from casual
exchanges to planned gatherings to sustained relations based on mutual
reciprocity and trust. Wet markets are signiFicant to Singaporeans because they
are spaces of unmediated social interactions (Mele, Ng & Chim, 2015)

Urban markets as a corrective to advanced urbanism: The social space of wet markets in contemporary
Singapore, Urban Studies, 52(1):103-120)

Are they really spaces of
unmediated social interactions?

(see next)

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices

:: Everyday civic spaces

Excerpt from Yes (2016) study of Jurong West neighbourhood diversity

As much as there is conviviality through the sharing and, quite literally,
fashioning of space here by the card players and other residents, there are also
certain principles that underlie the social organisation of diversity here.
Behaviour such as drinking at the corner is not tolerated and the sanction is
carried out through the practice of civility, which monitors and educates
transgressors. The spatiality of social organising principles pervasive in public
spaces therefore excludes behaviour that does not adhere to approved
behaviours but is reinforced through civility.

Sometimes new people dont understand our gui ju throw litter, sit anywhere they
like. But they can be nice people also. Especially Bangladeshis talk very gently, not
like those from China who talk so loud! But (we) dont like sitting next to yin du ren
(this term in Mandarin for Indians is here used as a catchall phrase for South Asian
male migrants) on the MRT trains because they smell bad ... but cannot tell them
directly because that would be very rude. We must also have gui ju. (ChineseSingaporean woman in her 50s)

Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices

:: Everyday civic spaces


Food for thought

Can civic spaces be unmediated?


Is Amins (2008) thesis on the compulsion of civic virtue in urban public
space overly optimistic?


How are politics of identities and migration/superdiversity (i.e. part 1 of
lecture) folded into production of urban space from below (i.e. part 2 of
lecture)?

Concluding

Part 1: Urban politics as politics of space
(a) Politics of identities
(b) Migration and superdiversity


Part 2: Becoming an urban citizen: power of spatial practices
(a) Urban citizen as P/p-olitical
(b) Everyday civic spaces
Relation to Project Work:
- everyday urban space analysed through Walking-Rhythm-Talking
- Issues of power (identities, mobilities, encounters): inclusions and
exclusions?
- Place-making: evidence of spatial inventions, claims, or struggles?
- Street-level multiculturalism/conviviality in urban site? Do these elide
social differences and unequal power relations?