cultural geographies

This article introduces a Special Issue on ‘cultural geographies of Precarity’. In recent years, the term precarity has become increasingly prevalent in geographical literature. And yet, to date, there remains limited discussion regarding how precarity is being culturally, as well as socially and economically, entrenched. To that end, this Special Issue provides timely perspectives on the cultural geographies of precarity in two key ways. First, it highlights how precarity is mediated and reproduced through a set of collective affects and imaginaries that not only normalize but often actively celebrate precarious modes of living in contemporary society, by branding them, for example, as innovative, flexible and entrepreneurial. Second, it focuses attention on how precarity is lived and resisted through the materialities and micro-space-times of everyday routines and places. Together, the four papers that constitute this Special Issue highlight the importance of a cultural geographies perspective on precarity in examining and challenging precarity as a new normal, which, in an increasingly precarious world, is a key concern for future geographical scholarship.

On the outskirts of Calais, the refugee camp known as ‘the Jungle’ was recently demolished, the final violent act in a long history of enforced precarity. In recent years, the camp had massively increased in inhabitants, and through the collective actions of these inhabitants, along with the volunteers that helped there, the Jungle inculcated what Doreen Massey would have described as a ‘progressive sense of place’, in that it espoused cultural and social richness, but also violent conflict. Richness in that the camp was a site where home is constantly made by the refugees and asylum seekers with help from the volunteers, but also of conflict because it was under constant attack from the authorities and prefecture of the site, culminating in its eventual demolition. They enacted domicidal and home ‘un-making’ practices, which meant that the inhabitants had to continually (re)make their notions of home. This home-making/un-making/re-making cycle was played out most readily via its materiality which was highly precarious. Through ethnographic and participative methods conducted as a volunteer, I posit that the Jungle was, and arguably still is, a site with material precarity embedded throughout, making it a ‘progressive’ place that mixed hope and despair, richness and conflict, home-making and un-making.

This article expands on current conceptualizations and applications of precarity by exploring the everyday socio-spatial complexities of migrant squatters living in informal hotels in the center of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Through ethnographic methods, this research investigates squatters’ practices of negotiating access to shared domestic spaces and resources, while experiencing long-term waiting for eviction from their home and potentially from the city center. Employing a cultural geographies approach, this work is concerned with understanding the ways in which precarity is routinely experienced in the micro-spaces of everyday life. Precarity is examined in its temporal and spatial manifestations, with particular emphasis on gendered experiences and home-making practices. Moving through daily spaces and routine situations, I document how precarity is embedded in the mundane tasks of the domestic, and as a result, unevenly impacts women whose traditional roles as mothers and caretakers mean that they are often at the fore of place-making practices and responsibilities.

Property guardianship, a form of short-term building security through temporary dwelling, has emerged in several European countries over the past 20 years. Despite being characterized by tenure insecurity and frequently substandard conditions, ‘living as a guardian’ has become a composite and polyvalent mode of inhabiting cities, rooted in the production and dissemination of distinctive spatial imaginaries of ‘nomadic’ urban dwelling. In the United Kingdom, where guardianship is relatively novel and marginal, the establishment of several intermediary companies has contributed to the rapid diffusion of the scheme as precarious ‘adventurous’ housing, particularly in metropolitan areas where guardianship schemes largely attract mobile and university-educated individuals. Drawing on debates about the complexities of ‘self-precarization’, this article examines imaginaries of property guardianship and their ambivalent significance in relation to lived processes of precarization. Through the analysis of media representations and in-depth interviews with current and former guardians in London, it explores how guardians mobilize narratives of adaptability, flexibility and nomadism between their resignation to existing housing conditions and a sense of critical and autonomous agency. This article proposes and develops a nuanced qualitative approach to analyse how precarious dwelling through guardianship is reshaping spatial imaginaries of acceptable and desirable urban housing, contributing to significant processes of individual and collective subjectification. At a moment of extensive governmentality through insecurity, it concludes that examining imaginaries and practices of self-precarization offers a critical entry point for understanding and rethinking, theoretically and politically, housing precarity and its geographies.

The population of Detroit has been steadily declining since the 1950s, but the imaginaries that shape the city are in constant transformation, changing with each successive government or regeneration initiative. Since 2010, downtown Detroit has been targeted by blight removal projects, real-estate speculation and redevelopment plans. These growth-oriented imaginaries shape the ways in which place is perceived and encountered – materially and conceptually – often responding to ruin and decay with erasures and evictions that play out through cultural geographies of precarity, simultaneously disappearing and reproducing conditions of inequality. The changes in the city are reflected in my own experiences of Detroit in 2009 and 2015, using walking and driving methods to support grounded and emplaced encounters with the ‘unbecoming’ ruins in the city. The city of 2009 is being replaced – in imagination, and in reality – by a new way of thinking about Detroit, which asks us to imagine differently, to positively re-envision the future possibilities for growth and change. This article interrogates the different imaginaries of regeneration in the city and considers, through urban ruins, places that are absent from the new way of thinking Detroit. Through Berlant’s ‘precarity’ and Massey’s ‘emplacement’, this discussion reveals a complex process of unbecoming that is typified in the unstable material, cultural and historical geographies that structure the experience of place in Detroit.

In this article, we argue that the non-human plays a vital role within networks of care. We do this through a consideration of the forms of work done by baby things in the giving and receiving of young-child care. We extend existing understandings of human–non-human relations by arguing that beyond the work of warming babies’ bodies and providing comfort, baby things function within care assemblages as both a means and a metric of parental care. Within the consumption literature, the work of home provisioning (typically undertaken by mothers) has been cast as an expression of love for others. We build on this by exploring the forms of participation and ‘caring capacities’ of matter itself – objects such as blankets, soft-toys and pacifiers – in the caring-for of babies and young children. We attend to the flows and stoppages of baby things across networks of early childhood caregiving to consider what these patterns of movement suggest about how such artefacts participate within relations of care, and how they are used as a means to reflect on the care practices of others. Analysis is based on 30 interviews with mothers and ethnographic and survey work at 14 children’s clothing exchanges in different parts of England and Scotland. Drawing on scholarship from the New Materialism as well as Mary Douglas’s conceptual work on dirt and cleanliness,¹ we advance conceptual work within and beyond Cultural Geography by arguing that analytical attention to the role of the more than human leads to richer and more nuanced understandings of how care relations work.

The Second World War indelibly transformed the political landscape of Southeast Asia. Few people in Myanmar’s Shan State today have any direct memories of the Japanese occupation and Allied bombing campaigns in the area. Therefore, folklore offers an important connection to the historical events and cultural geographies of war. Based on ethnography among Shan villagers carried out in 2015, this article discusses folklore regarding two specific aerial bombing incidents between the towns of Kyaukme and Hsipaw, Shan State. According to these narratives, local spiritual powers influenced the effects of either the bombs or the airplanes themselves. Through analysis of the stories, we learn of the capacity for local spiritual powers to extend their domain to the air, which, in turn offers a new way to understand airmindedness as a relationship with aviation technology and aerial geographies of war. In addition to articulating a Buddhist and spiritual framework for airmindedness, these stories also mobilize physical evidence not only to confirm their truth, but also to encourage Buddhist notions of morality in the future.

The authors trace the physical and cultural history of two iconic buildings in Havana, Cuba: the Havana Biltmore Yacht and Country Club and the Buena Vista Social Club. The ‘Biltmore’, now renamed the Club Havana, flourishes after several periods in which its survival was doubtful. The ‘Buena Vista’ had already long ceased its original functions at the time the film of that name was made in 1997. The article illuminates the enormous cultural significance with which certain buildings may be invested when the emotional title to the past is magnified by revolution and social turmoil.

This essay centres on a recent exhibition in Whitechapel Gallery, London – A Handful of Dust, curated by David Campany. The exhibition focuses on the thing/concept/idea of dust and features the work and thoughts of artists (e.g. Duchamp), photographers (e.g. Man Ray) and others. In this essay, we walk through the exhibition, pausing at some of its displays while contextualising a number of its many themes in the emerging literature on dust. Dust, we argue, teaches geographers about the fragmentary, the indeterminate, and blurs the line between order and disorder. As we attune to dust and appreciate its movements, we learn to cultivate a culture of geography with fewer certainties about the stability of earth, air and light. Through it, with it, we question, and embrace, the never-ending playfulness and displacement of our bodies and the positions from which we see, write and dust the earth.