This panel explores the impact of urban regeneration on urban communities. It will focus on how experimental ethnographies of urban housing (and other related infrastructures) may challenge short-term future visions of economy-led redevelopment and the renewal of urban environments.

In cities around the world, large-scale, economy-led processes of renewal and redevelopment tend to go hand-in hand with the demolition of perfectly viable buildings (and other social infrastructures). From the rubble, sanitised and seductive future visions of social and urban change, materialised in architectural renderings, marketing materials and community consultations, tend to emerge. In this panel we will challenge whether this so-called “creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1942; Harvey 1989) tied to the devaluation of pre-existing structures, landscapes and communities is inevitably linked with a city’s prosperous future.  
 
Instead of tearing down buildings, this panel aims to demolish deeply rooted systems of thought and prejudice by asking how short-sighted future imaginaries and relentless past and planned cycles of demolition and eviction have impacted on the health and wellbeing of local people; how do they deal with repeated broken promises over time? What practices and narratives of care emerge when people step in to care for each other, for their communities but also for their everyday material surroundings and ecological environments, when broader, conventional structures fail? 
 
We are especially interested in whether and how collaborative ethnographies and experimentations with exhibitions, films and other media that focus on caring for housing and the urban environment may assist in imagining what a more sustainable (social, ecological and technical) urban future may look like.

Place and Time

This panel will take place in Hjalmar Stolpesalen Auditorium on Saturday from 9:45-11:45.

Panel Convener

Inge Daniels, University of Oxford

Panelists

Andrew Byerley

Inge Daniels

Maryam Fanni

Jennifer Mack

Mayanka Mukherji

Anna Poloni

Meike Schalk