Speaker
Description
This paper proposes and discusses a novel concept of vulnerability and its implications for transformative urban policies and practices. As well known, vulnerability has gained a prominent role in several discourses concerning urban social and environmental justice. Within these discourses, vulnerability has become a sort of mental image which is used to represent conditions of exposure of territories, groups of people and non-humans to different kinds of stress. However, moving from discourses and images to urban planning practice, dealing with vulnerable territories, people, and environmental ecologies is still a problem. There are multiple definitions of vulnerability, and several are controversial and problematic, mainly if planning practices are concerned with spatial justice and the inclusion of marginal people and groups. Furthermore, vulnerability is often considered as something that increases passive behaviours and that can be seen with suspicion because of its being a technical dispositif of government. We critically discuss different approaches to vulnerability in order to define our perspective on vulnerability and its transformative potential.
As emerged from our theoretical and practical engagement -as researchers and planners- in shaping actions and projects aimed at opposing the marginality of migrants and populations which live in deprived neighbourhoods, for us, vulnerability can help urban policies to disclose transformative opportunities for an expanded vision of inclusion in the city so long as it is redefined as a complex process deeply rooted in an idea of transformative planning practice. For us, transformative planning is a way to disclose opportunities for inclusion which change the dynamics of the production of injustice and the associated power relations through placemaking.
Related to such an idea of transformative practice, we adopt a critical theoretical conceptualization of vulnerability as a complex process. Beyond being a condition, vulnerability is situational, contextual, relational, and profoundly shaped by the lived experience, including that of producing space through placemaking. This conceptualization connects vulnerability to values, power relations, and socio-ecological stories of places by activating the agency of the involved subjects towards the generation of more egalitarian and socially just directions of urbanization processes.
Through the stories of two different practices of placemaking in Sardinia and Apulia, we discuss the problems that remain to be faced and the prospects of our approach for enlarging the conceptions and possibilities of producing just and inclusive cities through vulnerability.
| Keywords | vulnerability trasformative panning spatial justice |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
