Precarious residence: Indigenous housing and the right to the city

Drawing on findings from a study of Indigenous housing in a regional Western Australian city, this paper examines the experiences of Indigenous peoples as a particular set of ‘right bearers’ within the right-to-the-city discourse. In settler-states, colonial discourses of absence, threat, and authenticity have informed policy frameworks that have militated against various Indigenous claims of belonging, rights, and aspiration in relation to urban places. Housing has been a representative domain of struggle in this respect. Consequently, today, Indigenous peoples have disproportionately high rates of dependence on more volatile and discriminatory forms of tenure than their non-Indigenous counterparts.The paper examines the incongruence between State aspirations to move (Indigenous) people along a housing continuum in urban environments, and the actual experiences of Indigenous urban residents, which fix discursively on barriers to such movements. It also traces the deleterious, displacing impacts for urban Indigenous households of the retreat of the State in its role as a landlord for the socio-economically disadvantaged, and in responding to market signals and particular sociological theses regarding poverty, with specific spatial logics. In so doing, we advance two interwoven arguments. First, we assert that Indigenous people face a unique precarity in the Australian urban housing system, which is a result of both colonial and racially discriminatory forces, and economically discriminating processes such as capital concentration and the commodification of land. Second, we contend that this precarity sets many Indigenous people on housing career trajectories that are antithetical to policy intentions.     

Post-welfare city at the margins: immigrant precarity and the mediating third sector in London

The putative post-welfare city is marked by a debate between continuity with previous welfare structures, versus a radical break whereby new, more punitive measures prevail. Seeking to clarify the role of the third sector at the margins of the debated post-welfare city, margins which can be characterized by a stigmatized and abandoned clientele, I focus on organizations serving precarious migrants in London. There were 15 interviews of third sector organizations across well-served, inner boroughs (Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets) and less well-served outer boroughs (Brent, Hounslow). The results indicated a mixed intermediary role for third sector organizations: strong in compensating and filling the gaps from an absent state, yet rather weak in contesting or challenging the overbearing state on behalf of their clients. More generically, the results also underlined the importance of looking beyond the labor market to appreciate the intricacies of social reproduction among precarious populations, as well as recognizing important continuities in support systems that belie a radical break with previous structures.     

Precarity among highly educated migrants: college graduates in Beijing,China

The growing knowledge-based and service economies in megacities like Beijing and Shanghai have attracted large numbers of highly educated migrants, whereas their living conditions have drawn plenty of attention. In examining these issues, we conducted an empirical study regarding the precarity among highly educated migrants in Beijing. There are some structural and institutional factors underneath the highly educated migrants’ precarity, as the household registration (hukou) system still plays a significant role in accessing social welfare (urban public housing) and job opportunities in Beijing. Although the new urban poverty has occurred in the city as a result of the questionable policies regarding social distribution and welfare, it can also be argued that some of these migrants view temporary precarity as a strategy toward future upward social mobility – the hope of doing better over the long term.     

Regulatory migration regimes and the production of space: The case of Nepalese workers in South Korea

This paper engages with contemporary debates in labour geography through its focus on: migrant workers as active agents of change; precarious employment, its complexities and consequences; and the importance of material spaces in migrant labour struggles. Since the early 2000s the South Korean government has been strengthening the institutionalised regulation of low-wage migrant workers. A key tool in this process is the Employment Permit System (EPS), in force since 2004. Under this policy migrant workers are temporary sojourners and effectively socio-politically, culturally and spatially excluded from Korean society. EPS restricts migrants’ freedom to choose or change workplaces, which renders them vulnerable to economic and social precarity. Employers use these restrictions to segregate migrant workers from co-nationals, and low-waged migrant workers often find themselves in exploitative working conditions in isolated places. This paper is based on deep ethnographic fieldwork in “Nepal Town” in Seoul and remote Nepalese workers’ accommodation. We examine how such precarious working conditions and isolation impact on workers’ active involvement in the formation and transformation of Nepal Town in Seoul. We examine the ways in which Nepal Town is a site of spatial agency and praxis for Nepalese workers and explore the potentialities of ‘reactive ethnicity’. The empirical insights provided, suggest that the regulatory migration regime for low-wage migrant workers is strongly linked with new formations of material landscapes of connection, mobility, freedom and safe space. Such space production enables migrant workers to perform agency and employ tactics of resistance in order to create spaces of possibility.     

Undoing violence, unbounding precarity: Beyond the frames of terror in the Philippines

Geographers’ interest in the productive intersections between fear and issues of (counter)terrorism has flourished in recent years. These studies have been important in their critical analyses of geopolitical relations by exposing how fear has been driving unjust policies and violent initiatives. However, I suggest that these lines of inquiries often neglect the localized playing out of fears, particularly how such sentiments can potentially stimulate actions and affect the practices and progress of politics at different geographical scales.This paper addresses the aforementioned lacuna by scrutinizing how fear is bounded up with the geographical extension of the US-led ‘war on terror’ to the Philippines in the post 9/11 era. I argue that the framings of terrorism in the country have allowed the government to manipulate fear to justify destructive strategies for the eradication of imminent ‘threats’. However such initiatives are not only counterproductive to rooting out the sources of terror but also aid in the (re)production of violence. Not assuming the inevitability of such elegaic outcomes, I showcase the efforts of the Philippines communist ‘rebel’ group, Rebulusyonaryong Partido ng Manggagawa ng Mindanao (RPM-M), in repudiating official terrorism discourse by emphasising instead issues of state-induced vulnerability and marginalization. This in turn allows fear to be transformed into other modalities of emotions that are central to the formation of coalitional resistances to the arbitrary effects of state violence and its vicissitudes.By illuminating the constitution of (non)violence through emotions, there is an inherent wish to disrupt the natural conjoining of fear, terror and violence dominating contemporary geopolitical imaginations. Crucially, the implications of emotions for the thinking and doing of nonviolence augments a concrete pathway for operationalising a radical praxis of peace and justice that explicitly eschews a resort to force.     

Between a rock and a hard place: Vulnerability and precarity in rural Nepal

Drawing on a local study on Nepal’s Terai, this paper explores the nature of livelihood exposure to shocks and stresses among rural households in two Village Development Committees in Sunsari District. The primary data are derived from a 117 household survey supplemented by 19 purposefully sampled follow-up interviews. The paper opens with a discussion of the changing nature of exposure in the global South, distinguishing between inherited vulnerability and produced precarity. We then provide background to the research site and the research methods. In the core empirical part of the paper we unravel and distinguish between the livelihood threats and opportunities faced by households in the area and use these to reflect on the nature of ’exposure’, its historical origins and contemporary (re)production. The final part of the paper uses the Nepal case to build a more general argument, proposing that if we are to understand the puzzle of continued livelihood exposure and uncertainty in the context of aggregate economic expansion we need to identify and interrogate the processes that may, at the same time, produce wealth and reduce vulnerability, while also generating precarity.