Im Rahmen der Jahreskonferenz der American Anthropological Association, die vom 20. bis 24. November in Vancouver stattfinden wird, organisierten Prof. Dr. Alexa Färber und Laura Kemmer einen Runden Tisch zu "The Promise of the City: Conditions of urban change and collective endurance".
Abstract
The Promise of the City
Conditions of urban change and collective endurance
This roundtable explores the conceptual value of the promise in (urban) anthropology as it intersects with the 2019 conference theme of “changing climates/changer d’air”. In many world regions, the city is considered as decisive locus of both hopeful futures and apocalyptic scenarios. An increasing number of actors – from international planning agendas, over urban researchers, to residents’ movements – point to the demographic, political and economic weight of cities for either alleviating or worsening climate change, inequality and crises of all kinds. This roundtable takes up on the AAA’s call to reflect upon the relationship of social change and imaginations of shared futures. We conceive of the city as assemblage of people, things, imaginaries, held together by a series of promises which are replete with ambiguity, frustration, and conflict. In this way, the promise to incite urban change made by urban authorities of all kinds is constantly challenged by the multiple promises of the material elements populating the city. Across the humanities and social sciences, promises have been theorized as performative speech acts, as affective bonds, as a political project, a particular tense, or a spatial relation. By bringing together anthropologists that have translated the notion into a workable concept, this roundtable discusses how the promises can serve as a tool that helps us understand the quality of cities as sites of change; of how they are invested with hopes and anxieties; how they produce all kinds of more-than-human collaborations and temporalities as conditions for an ambivalent mode of endurance.