Contesting fragmentation. Notes on urban composition practices from city margins

RAMIRO SEGURA

Köln

Workshop; International Workshop "Poetics, Materialisms, Formations. Current Contributions to Urban Lives from Cities in the South"; 2023

MECILA - Global South Studies Center (GSSC), Universität zu Köln

In recent decades several voices have criticized the unproblematic assumption by urban studies of the modern idea of "the city" as a large, dense, self-contained, and delimited socio-spatial unit. From the theories of the social production of the space Brenner (2017), taking up some classic proposals of Lefebvre (1970), has pointed out that research should move from the city to the urbanization process, understood as a contradictory dynamic of implosion and explosion that produces new forms of urbanized landscape. On the other hand, from postcolonial theories there has been a call to “open” the geography of urban studies theory, traditionally restricted to the urban experience of a few paradigmatic cities of the Global North (Robinson 2002; Roy 2013). This claim is not reduced, however, to expanding the empirical variability of the urban through the aggregation of “interesting cases” from the Global South, but rather to rethinking the historical difference between asymmetrically interconnected urban processes that require generating new ways of theorizing the urban (Roy, 2016). Likewise, in a critical dialogue with both perspectives -due to the supposed deconstructive emphasis of postcolonial theories and the supposed re-centering of the cities of the Global North in the case of theories of the production of space-, Schindler (2017) has recently proposed the guidelines for a “southern urbanism” that would avoid the stereotyped labeling questioned by postcolonial perspectives and, at the same time, would provide keys to understand contemporary urbanization in a situated manner. In short, regardless of the positions and reasons in a broad debate that involves both the contemporary social processes of space production as well as the theoretical and epistemological perspectives from which these processes are analyzed, there is an underlying shared conviction about the need for re-imagine and re-map the urban.I would like to explore in this article the productivity of urban anthropology for this task taking in account some ethnographic findings of my research in the western periphery of La Plata, Argentina. I think that the strength of the anthropological approach to urban processes still rest on a characteristic feature of the discipline: the production of situated and in-depth knowledge of everyday urban practices that allow to describe and understand the modes in which inhabitants participate in the production of environments within which they unfold their lives. In terms of the anthropologist Michel Agier (2015), it is about describing and following the permanent movement of urban transformation in time and space, the ways in which the city is made and unmade (Segura, 2023). It is this movement of "making city" (Agier, 2015) that helps to understand urban dynamics from the observation of concrete, situated, and contingent situations and at the same time allows avoiding a normative definition of what the city is or should be.