Tuesday 5 May 2020

Negotiating Racialised Public Space



In response to the race-based attacks growing in “Western” cities, I am writing to see if anyone would be interested in co-organising a series of short ZOOM discussion.

The increasing attacks on East Asians in “Western” cities; the othering of non-Chinese bodies in the wider Southeast and East Asia, as well as ostracization of Wuhan residents in other parts of China, will no doubt impact the way minorities experience and use public space located in within the majoritarian urban landscape they are situate in. As persons interested in space (and time, which conditions space), this leads us to the question:

How has the event of COVID produced and/or reaffirmed a biopolitics that transformed the manner minorities negotiate public space (both online and physical)?

To address the event of COVID’s impact and racialization of public space, a multiscale approach is needed. This is because the space of COVID itself is more than the neighbourhood or city-scale; and its temporality reaches further back and into the future beyond the months of lock-down and quarantine.
This question also opens to a question about intervention, which then might be explore through, but not limited to, the following avenues:

  • Uses and abuses of the legal system. Particularly, what might be the weak points of the approach of Law-as-absolute code. In response how might an approach of situated-ethics and -jurisprudence can be used to forge a transformative assertion of race to counter racially divisive public space?
  •  Bodies of land-use and building policy. Land-Use policies, social policies and even building design guidelines and codes are never simply architectural or even social – built forms and social forms are always political, historical and ideological. How have current land use patterns and built-form directives, sustained racialised spaces? More precisely, how have current land use policies and built-forms naturalised racist foundations that led to spatial inequity? How can the body of policy be transformed?
  • Global publica. Here it is to ask, how can global networks that can exist outside of both private and state-public bodies help create a new kind of forum to allow for democratic expressions against racism? At the same time, to explore a global publica is also an opportunity how what might seem to be very localised approaches to matters like land-use or bank-loaning systems can have planetary impacts.
  •  Intersection between different racialised bodies. This call for intersection is not to press for a universal body. Rather, it is to explore how to form another kind of universality or commonality that stems from joining forces to create new racialised bodies which can combat the very stratification of race in space.
  •  Etc.

The above themes may be developed by themselves or crossed with each other. For example, one can imagine a question of how different racialised bodies can form a global publica (and what kind) to transform the body of policies. Besides substantive issues being addressed, it is also an opportunity to use physical space (however stratified and hierarchal it is) to rethink the space of thinking.

Please email me at: posing<dot>urbanite<at>gmail<dot>com

Looking forward to hearing from you.