Urban ecologies of survival (1/2)

Abstract der Sitzung

Amidst rapidly changing planetary futures, the urban is at once a place of possibility and crisis. It is no doubt a space where a range of beings flourish, if not thrive, so why centre survival? With discourses and rhetorics of resilience, repair or resurgence being prominent, survival might seem to be at odds with what a good life or a good city might look or feel like. And yet, through increasing political polarization, the rise of racial hierarchies of mobility and the casino roulettes of capitalism, survival is that which is beginning to mark the tenets of habitability, in the urban and beyond. A vital feature of urban inhabitation, and survival, is that it is happening against the grain of planning, design and script, whether in the Global South or North, where different milieus - understood as compositions that cross human and other-than-human divides - forge other forms of habitability in the face of a denial of infrastructure, poor access to basic staples, and the unrelenting eviscerations from the urban sphere the marginalized face. Simultaneously, survival has become a heated contestation. It unfolds in the face of violence, not always direct, but one that unfolds in an accretive pace or slow death (Berlant 2007).

When we invoke survival, we are interesting in both who survives (those in the margins, and those marginalized for an array of reasons) but also what survives: ecologies that are remnants or refugia (Jasper 2018) fragments, somehow holding on or refusing to be subsumed (cf. Simone 2019), those that are derelict, as formations of the past renewed (Gandy 2022). Crucial in this respect is also the question of how beings and the ecologies in which they are enmeshed survive: are they decimated, traumatized, sore, genetically mutated or chronically ill? Have survivors barely made it or do they feel victorious and enthralled at having lived (through)? What does survival leave behind - in bodies, minds, environments and the ‘corroded hollows of landscape’ (Stoler 2008)? What role does social and financial capital play in how one survives, and how does this complement or evade vernacular practices, including alignments with other-than-humans, through which survival is made possible? Does survival mean -or contrast with- resurgence and renewal? In whose words should one ventriloquize survival?

In this session we want to think with survival when we think about the conference theme of “plantetary futures”. In what ways does survival open up new thinking on urban ecologies and futures, in ways that complement and even question or extend notions of resilience, care and repair, that have become prominent in urban grammars? And if we shifted the emphasis to an urban meshwork: why an ecology of survival? What relations, configurations, machines and geographies constitute survival? What kinds of interventions and attentiveness does it prompt, and what forms of innovation and practice does it draw inspiration from?