[Reader-list] Invitation to a Talk: Cairo: Cartographies of Exclusion in Middle East Urbanism

Shilpa Phadke phadkeshilpa at gmail.com
Sat Feb 28 01:34:54 IST 2009


 Please fwd widely. Apologis for cross-posting.




Centre for Media & Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
Mumbai

and

Urban Design Research Institute

are very pleased to invite you to a talk titled:

*Cairo**: Cartographies of Exclusion in Middle East Urbanism*

by *Martina Rieker*



*Date*:   04 March 2009

*Time*:  6.30 p.m.

*Place*: Urban Design Research Institute

43 Dr V.B. Gandhi Marg

Kala Ghoda

Fort

Mumbai 400 023

Tel: 65735773



*Abstract:*

The transformation of the modernist city with its celebration of diversity
into gated enclaves of the affluent and far away informal communities of the
poor is a *sine qua non* of contemporary critical urban literature.  What is
less well understood are the implications of the experience of the urban for
the working poor in much of the global south. With the growth of informal
laboring practices in post-industrial urban economies different sorts of
creative mobility is demanded of the people who inhabit the contemporary
city at its social and economic margins. Contemporary practices of visioning
the urban (on the part of youth, women, men) are both embedded in and expand
beyond the register of an earlier 'rights to the city' narrative. Drawing on
research in Cairo, the first part of this paper examines ways in which these
new urban mobilities re-articulate visions of the urban for the working
poor.  The neo-liberalization of the quotidian megatropolis raises important
questions concerning the meaning of local exclusionary spatial inscriptions
as such. With modernist urban centre and periphery models, among others, no
longer providing a productive analytic grid through which to understand
practices of the city, the second part of the paper explores forms of
connections, communications, exchanges and activisms and that are being
created within the temporal-spatial register of a very specific neo-liberal
urban project.



*About the Speaker:*

Martina Rieker is Director of the Institute for Gender and Women's Studies
at the American University in Cairo. Together with Kamran Ali she is the
co-founder and co-coordinator of the Shehr Comparative Urban Landscapes in
the Middle East, South Asia, Africa Network (www.shehr.net) The Shehr
network is an academic initiative that seeks to further a social-historical
and critical understanding of contemporary cities and urban practices in the
Middle East, South Asia and Africa. The initiative examines the efficacy of
the category of the city in modernist discourse and seeks to chart this
spatial imagination and its effects through an exploration of the complex
processes through which gendered, classed, and raced citizen-subjects have
negotiated and been the object of urban projects in these regions. Attuned
to both the legacy of modernist conceptual grammars and their inadequacy for
understanding the remaking of space and place in the neo-liberal present,
the purpose of the network is to open up an arena in which to address the
particular positioning(s) of contemporary urban landscapes and urban
practices through theme-based workshops, publications and an on-line
discussion and exchange forum. Recent network publications ed. by Ali/
Rieker include *Gendering Urban Space *(Palgrave, 2007), *Comparing Cities:
Middle East/South Asia* (Oxford University Press, 2009 forthcoming) and a
special issue of the journal *Social Text *(95/ 2008) entitled "Urban
Margins: Envisioning the Global South."


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