Organiser: Giovanni Picker (European University Viadrina, DE); Silvia Pasquetti (University of Cambridge, UK).
Contacs: picker@europa-uni.de; sp638@cam.ac.uk
While challenged or obfuscated by perspectives such as multiculturalism and hybridity, the ‘ideal’ city often evokes hygenized and purified urban spaces, which are divided along class, race, and nationality. Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva, among others, have highlighted the role of ideas of purity and pollution in structuring social relations and subjectivities. Studies on sex and gender urban divisions, sanitation, and, more broadly, ‘technological networks’ within cities have deployed the concepts of purity and pollution as meta-phenomena relating to certain symbolic meanings, but not as broader ideals actively shaping social relations.
This session aims to address how the paired concepts of purity and pollution shape urban policy, public discourses, everyday practices, and their related negotiations, critiques and resistances. In particular, we will address the making and unmaking of urban closures, which are intended as both splitted spatial configurations and mental and symbolic processes of purified partitioning.
We seek papers focusing on:
- the (de)formation of purified urban localities,
- the production and working of hygenized mental maps,
- the role of ideals of purity within cities.
We are equally interested in papers looking at how purified urban configurations are lived through, negotiated, and transgressed. In examining these questions, the sessions invites papers that explore specific historical or contemporary case studies, engage in broader theoretical reflections, as well as papers that approach the making and unmaking of urban closures from a comparative and global perspective.
E3.1 The Making and Unmaking of Urban Closures: Scrutinizing the ‘Purified’ City / Stream E – Contested cities
Chairs: Giovanni Picker (European University Viadrina) Silvia Pasquetti (University of Cambridge).
Contacts: picker@europa-uni.de; sp638@cam.ac.uk
Anasua Chatterjee
Interrogating Urban Closures in the South Asian City: Kolkata’s Muslim Neighbourhoods
Jonathan Darling
Urban enclosure, forced migration and the search for ‘purity’: the revanchist management of asylum seekers in urban Britain
Paula Gil Larruscahim and Paul Schweizer
Pixação, hygienizing policies and difference in São Paulo
Jeff Maskovsky
Contesting the Purification of the City
Distributed papers
Gaja Maestri
The Persistence of the Roma Camps in Rome: The Segregating Effects of Purity
E3.2 The Making and Unmaking of Urban Closures: Scrutinizing the ‘Purified’ City
Chairs: Giovanni Picker (European University Viadrina) Silvia Pasquetti (University of Cambridge).
Contacts: picker@europa-uni.de; sp638@cam.ac.uk
Egbert Alejandro Martina, Patricia Schor
White Order: Racialization of Public Space in The Netherlands
Paula Mota Santos
Lisbon’s Chinatown and the ordering of the Other in Portuguese social space
Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe
Shifting Dirtyscapes – Society, Space and Culture around Notions of Garbage in Istanbul
Distributed papers
Maria Pirogovskaya
Constructing a Hygieopolis, Complaining the Neighbour: City, Health and Danger in Late Imperial Russia
Prashant Bansode
The Synchronicity of Purifying City and Social Closure
