Projektleitung
Sabrina Stallone, M.A.
Abstract
Predictions about the future development of cities are often at the forefront of municipal governance practices, on many occasions strongly influencing urban political trajectories. But how do these normative “politics of probability” (Appadurai 2013: 295) affect how city dwellers organize their present in relation to linear future projections? How do they contribute to creating embodied spaces of anticipation? At the intersection of urban anthropology and feminist geography, my research is concerned with urban future scenarios and how they are constructed, imagined and contested in the Swiss city of Zurich along categories of difference such as gender, race or citizenship. The largest and wealthiest city in Switzerland, Zurich’s municipality has been busy designing linear scenarios of growth and progress ever since the beginning of the city’s current wave of growing prosperity in the early 2000s, credited largely to a booming, globally-renowned financial sector. In 2018, the city government passed a masterplan (“Kommunaler Richtplan”) titled Zurich 2040, addressing issues ranging from housing to mobility infrastructure, from public space design to security strategies. The 166-page plan’s main rationale is based on scenarios of continuous growth, envisioning a population increase by 25% of the city’s total current headcount in the coming twenty years, and orienting its infrastructural planning approach entirely towards this anticipated rise in residents.
Such speculative plans are no novelty to state agencies’ power exertion, and ‘expansion talk’ is part and parcel of the dynamic stabilization (Rosa 2017) that channels capitalist uncertainties into probability discourses. Mobilizing key questions from urban anthropology, I ask: what do these plans do as they make promises about the future (Abram & Weszkalnys 2013: 10)? How are political collectivities, politics of belonging and exclusion articulated alongside these plans? How are these linear scenarios of growth fueling existing imaginaries of ‘threatening’ urban growth spurs, uncontrolled migration, and surplus populations, which for years have been prominent pillars of right-wing discourses in Switzerland? And where and by whom are these imaginaries opposed, through embodied practice and presence?
In order to ethnographically observe the effects of these politics of probability within Zurich’s political context, I focus on the usage of some of the city’s dwindling construction land reserves, those interstitial spaces of supposedly “undeveloped land”, set aside as receptacles for future large-scale urban projects. I examine how these sites spatialize the tensions between the promises made in linear future scenarios, and the contestations of these speculative logics of the “not yet, but soon” (Runting 2017: 267) through acts of everyday social reproduction. My focus on interstitial space departs from the presupposition that “a space devoid of purpose is hardly ever devoid of projections, attitudes, fears and hopes” (Amato 2021: 257). In order to illuminate these affective dimensions, I engage in ethnographic research with the dwellers, activists and association members who resist linear future plans for these spaces formulated in the future tense, by caring for and through them, counterplanning their development through interim usage and alternative construction plans, and organizing political action in and outside direct democratic, municipal institutions.
My theoretical and methodological framework is structured by a minor theory (Katz 1994) approach and a focus on embodied space (Low 2003). Minor theory, as a feminist geographic concept, focuses on how knowledge about space and place is constructed in everyday life. It sees spatial knowledge as “inextricably relational” (1994: 489), and thus always in the process of becoming. Minor theory is not located in opposition to “major” theory, and instead attends to the “interstitial spaces of major theory” (Temenos 2017: 579), seeing them as two uses of the same language. I use minor theory to focus on embodied space, which underscores “the importance of the body as a physical and biological entity, lived experience, and a center of agency, a location for speaking and acting on the world” (Low 2003: 10). Using these two lenses together, it becomes possible to examine how interstitial spaces are crucial to the negotiation and imagination of urban growth as a bodily and affective matter, opening up questions regarding the (un-)wanted bodies of Zurich’s envisioned expansion. Thinking with these two concepts translates into a methodological toolkit that includes participant observation and interviews with feminist and climate activists locating their activities on the observed sites, local (migrant) associations forming around political struggles for their preservation and/or development, architects, planners and other city dwellers, as well as archival fieldwork on the social production of these spaces (Low 2017) through urban historical structures of migration, domination and marginalization.
Supervision
Prof. Dr. Sabine Strasser (Universität Bern)
Disziplin
Sozialanthropologie
