Affective (in)securities: atmospheres of unease and threat in urban Europe
Autor
K. Ciax
Erscheinungsjahr
This thesis examines how urban dwellers’ perceptions and affective experiences of urban spaces have shifted, particularly in light of increasing securitization and security measures. By analysing the altered (im)material, infrastructural, and practice-based security, this thesis highlights the role of the affective in the everyday geopolitics of urban spaces, which has been largely neglected in existing empirical studies. The analysis aims to conceptualize spatialized emotions as affective atmospheres, considering how spaces are perceived and experienced. It also sheds light on the articulation and (re)production of affects as a governance tool. This study is particularly interested in understanding how hegemonic security efforts resonate or fail to resonate with the needs of various urban communities. Therefore, it also examines alternative approaches to security that centre around care and awareness instead of control and surveillance. In terms of methodology, the analysis is based on an in-depth sensory and spatial ethnographic study of European cities, with a particular focus on Berlin. The study illustrates how the persistent political production of (in)security and threats affects the comfort level of urban dwellers. Furthermore, the analysis shows how especially racialized and marginalized communities are distressed by the often-exclusionary infrastructures and technologies of the security state and how the implementation of security in urban spaces is not always suited to the needs of those living in them. The study contributes to a critical examination of the ongoing urban securitization. It informs our theoretical understanding of securities and safeties by introducing a focus on the affective and experiential realm of (in)securitize(d) urban spaces.
Rhythmic rush: everyday outpatient care within microgeographies of home and “service complex systems”
Autor
D. Kauer
Erscheinungsjahr
Erschienen in:
Geographica Helvetica: Swiss journal of geography
As ageing beings, the home spaces we inhabit in old age become pivotal in engendering a sense of security and emotional and physical well-being. Therefore, long-term outpatient carers work in highly sensitive contexts, wherein the establishment of a trusting atmosphere is of great significance. The introduction of the private sector into the long-term care market in Germany has led to the establishment of standards for each care task. This paper explores the rhythms of the implemented system of the so-called “service complexes” for long-term outpatient care by using a rhythm analysis. In doing this, I reflect on the effects of constructed standards on body(spaces), work processes and home spaces, which are sustained by digital technologies. The research is grounded in qualitative fieldwork conducted in the rural Altenburger Land, a region with one of the oldest populations in Germany. The findings illustrate the impact of the commodification of care on nurses, the corporeality of clients and their spaces of private retreat.
Spatial sympathies and mobile aspirations: geopolitics of the everyday in encounters with university students in Kyrgyzstan
Autor
B. Meier
Erscheinungsjahr
Imagining and aspiring ‘somewhere abroad’ is perhaps a tendency familiar to most persons on an increasingly interconnected planet. My present research focuses on the phenomenon of these mobile aspirations and their cultivation by youth. In their capacity to influence inclinations towards places one has never been to, and ultimately potential migration, they offer a lens to investigate the everyday as a scene of the geopolitical. At the core of my investigations into this phenomenon lies the hypothesis that youth’s aspirations for mobility do not arise out of the blue. Rather, they derive from a process of cultivating spatial sympathies towards mobile aspirations. Initial spatial sympathies emerge in affective encounters with impressions that have the capacity to evoke inclinations toward distant or unknown places. These inclinations are charged with geopolitical implications, given their impact on perceptions and orientations towards places one has never visited in person. The structuring processes underlying the cultivation of mobile aspirations are described in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s theorisations, as influences exerted within a field of social forces. Bourdieu explicitly links the cultivation of aspirations to habitus formation, emphasising the general tendency to adapt aspirations to perceived chances and opportunities in constant recourse to the social field. These frequently unconscious or unnoticed processes are considered geopolitically relevant as they contribute to imaginaries of a ‘somewhere abroad’. Grounded in these theoretical considerations, my research with university students in the Kyrgyz Republic traces the social forces structuring spatial sympathies towards mobile aspirations in affective encounters. Students in Bishkek, Osh, and Naryn, as youth socialised in a comparatively young and mobile societal context, can be ascribed increased migration potential and, thus, geopolitical power, as my empirical work, drawing on encounters, argues. Therefore, I employ ethnographic and participatory methods in the framework of an affective ethnography. In my encounters with students, four social forces stand out as major sources of influence on the cultivation of mobile aspirations: close social ties, especially with parents; a commodified education system; impressions floating in globalised cultural consumption; and gendered socialisations. As affective resonances to mediated impressions of a ‘somewhere abroad’ floating in the everyday, spatial sympathies carry a geopolitical momentum that has the powerful potential to ignite a spark engendering bodily attraction towards a certain place. I therefore shed light on the social contexts and processes in the everyday that structure students’ mobile aspirations. These are indicative of potential agency and thus imbued with power, ultimately feeding into a geopolitics of spatial affective affinities, a geopolitics of the everyday.
Revealing a Life-World Perspective for Urban Planning: Conceptual Reflections and Empirical Evidence from Peri-Urban Maputo (Mozambique)
Autoren
A. Prestes Dürrnagel, E. Rothfuß, T. Dörfler
Erscheinungsjahr
Erschienen in:
Land
Cities in sub-Saharan Africa are growing at an unprecedented rate, resulting in the significant expansion of peri-urban spaces. Postcolonial planning reflects the instrumental rationale continued by colonial legacies and largely fails to take the realities of the peri-urban population into account. As the example of Maputo, the Mozambican capital, demonstrates, the consequences are far-reaching. Implementing individual land titling programs promotes the commodification of space and the individualization of collective life, while the modernist vision of a homogeneous physical order leads to the socio-spatial alienation of existing residents and large-scale displacements. Employing a life-world approach in Alfred Schütz’s tradition, this paper brings the everyday reality of peri-urban dwellers into focus, offering a renewed planning agenda. Building on place-based research and life-world analytical ethnography, the reconstruction of practices and experiences illuminates the “paramount reality” of everyday life in Maputo as necessary entry points for an urban planning agenda that reconciles both the life-world of the people and the instrumental realities of state and planning actors. Applying a life-world perspective to urban planning reveals a realistic and inclusive approach grounded in the experience and social reality of the people living in the “ordinary city”.
Religious Inflection in the Economy of Experience: The Concept of Atmosphere in Aes-thetic and Phenomenological Thought of Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Böhme
Geopolitics of Urban Squares: Atmospheric Securitisation and Counterterrorism in Everyday Urban Spaces in Berlin
Autoren
K. Ciax, S. Runkel
Erscheinungsjahr
Erschienen in:
Geopolitics
In this article, we scrutinise the concept of ‘affective atmosphere’ at the Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, Germany. By unpacking key moments and elements in the Breitscheidplatz’s history, when measures of security and counterterrorism transformed, we investigate how the felt experience of city dwellers and users of the square altered. We argue that the concept of atmosphere, taking the affective dimension of urban life into account, offers an enriching layer of understanding the everyday life in European cities. By focusing on the spatial and affective securitisation that was implemented before and after the attack in 2016, this paper converges everyday urban geopolitics and the concept of affective atmospheres. Bringing together the engagement with experiences of everyday urban life and the atmospheric situation that security and counter-terrorism measure entail in European urban spaces. This paper approximates the felt experience and intangible elements with the help of sensory ethnographies. Shedding light on the aesthetic and sensorial paradoxes of securitisation and counterterrorism measures, hegemonic practices of affective politics and discriminatory spatial expulsion are unravelled.