The climate crisis has transformed the planet, bringing it to the brink of uninhabitability. According to recurring data published by the IPCC, if global warming is not stopped, the unleashed climatic disorders will lead humans and non-humans to doomsday scenarios. In this sense, while some institutions explore climate change adaptation and mitigation measures –trying to rebuild cities in the face of extreme weather events, within the same modern world–, the idea of the end of the world has spread in contemporary thought. For some authors, guaranteeing future habitability horizons cannot be achieved in a world still tied to an idea of progress that continues to understand the future according to the Promethean rules of unlimited modernity. However, neither the idea of the climate crisis nor the experience of the end of the world are new for many groups and subjects subjugated by capitalist modernity. Black (McKittrick, 2011), indigenous (Krenak, 2019), Roma (Romero and García, 2019), feminist, queer or working-class urbanisms constitute, in this sense, inspiring repertoires to sustain and care for life in worlds dominated by poverty, death, systematic violence or the absence of a future. We consider inhabiting as an act of resistance against a system that promotes its exclusive perpetuity and tries to present itself as a structure without alternatives. In this sense, pessimism and guilt are essential components in the deactivation of collective agency and autonomous initiatives that arise in the face of the myth of modern self-sufficiency. We believe that the human being cannot be fulfilled individually, without depending on other forms of life or the community (Herrero, 2010). These much-needed changes are already taking place in the margins and cracks of the system (Filigrana, 2020), in those territories where existence itself represents forms of urban dissidence or divergence. We think about places where collective survival strategies have been developed against the dynamics of expulsion, dispossession and death; common tactics that show us that there are other ways of inhabiting and existing in common that make another life possible. This session proposes to approach these experiences, which we call decolonial urbanisms, to explore improvised, fugitive and opaque ways of inhabiting territories in a different way. We consider that these ways of inhabiting contain practices, knowledge and infrastructural arrangements –powerful and subtle– that can be vital to reimagine, transform and recompose urban territories in the midst of a crisis that announces inhospitable futures.
We consider it relevant to think creatively and collectively about the possibility and continuity of life together in a damaged world. For this, this session will focus on the study of the ways of inhabiting the uninhabitable, paying attention to the infrastructural arrangements, the forms of socality, ways fo life-in-common and the knowledge deployed to make life possible in spaces where it does not seem to be. We aspire to bring together a handful of research and collective experiences on insurgent and fugitive territorialities that make it possible to affirm life in common beyond collapse, violence, and necropolitics. We encourage participants to share empirical materials and collaborative fieldwork on practices related to the ideia of inhabiting the uninhabitable. Contributions can be made in English, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Basque and Galician languages. We aim to address some of the following points:
The sudy of places or environments of sacrifice that have become community activators and scenarios for alternative proposals for living.
Research about the territorial expressions that arise from experiences related to political, economic or socio-environmental violence and become visible in the territory.
Experiences on inhabiting a foreign or excluding city and the processes of reappropriation and reinvention of the home and quotidian existence.
Practices of urban fugitivity where racialiced lives are affirmed despite racial subjugation.
Doing research from the margins: the Global North and South.
New methodological approaches in territorial studies, focusing on the analysis of everyday life and the mobilisation of memories and narratives.
Enquiries that explore the expressions of affectivities, bodies and non-normative existences in relation to territoryies and their transformation.
Experiences of territorialization and existential sovereignty in contexts of dispossession and exclusion.
Cristina Botana Iglesias (1); Brais Estévez Vilariño (1)
(1) Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
ID Abstract:
