Till, Karen E.
(2012)
Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care.
Political Geography, 31 (1).
pp. 3-14.
ISSN 0962-6298
Abstract
What would it mean to think about cities marked by past structures of violence and exclusion as
wounded but also as environments that offer its residents care? My current book in progress, Wounded
Cities, focuses on creative practices and politics in Bogotá, Cape Town, Berlin, Minneapolis, and Roanoke,
cities in which settlement clearances have produced spaces so steeped in oppression that the geographies
of displacement continue to structure urban social relations. Precisely in and through these
‘wounded cities’, residents, artists, educators, and activists reconsider the meanings of the ‘right to the
city’ and to theorizing the city more broadly. Drawing upon ethnographic research and theories from
postcolonial theory, social psychiatry, social ecology, feminist political theory, and art theory, I introduce
my concepts of ‘wounded city’, ‘memory-work’, and a ‘place-based ethics of care’ to retheorize urban
politics. Artists and residents in wounded cities encourage political forms of witnessing to respect those
who have gone before, attend to past injustices that continue to haunt contemporary cities, and create
experimental communities to imagine different urban futures. I argue that a deeper appreciation of the
lived, place-based experiences of inhabitants of most cities would enable planners, policy makers, and
urban theorists to consider more ethical and sustainable forms of urban change than those that continue
to legitimate disciplinary forms of governmentality.
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Keywords: |
Wounded cities;
Memory-work;
Care;
Right to the city; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography |
| Item ID: |
9005 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.10.008 |
| Depositing User: |
Dr. Karen Till
|
| Date Deposited: |
16 Nov 2017 16:08 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
Political Geography |
| Publisher: |
Elsevier |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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