Crisis Urbanism: Municipal Experiments, Interventions, and Innovations in response to “urban crises” of encampment

Keywords: Urban crisis, migration, drug policy, encampments, Paris
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper explores the ways that “crisis” is articulated in cities lead to and justify various policy innovations, interventions and shortcuts that can collectively be understood as forms of what I call crisis urbanism. I demonstrate these tendencies through the lens of recent histories of unhoused peoples’ street encampments in Paris, France that have both focused perceptions of various interconnected crises including so-called “migration crises”, drug policy crises, and the ongoing, ever-present generalized housing affordability crisis, and are also understood, through their affective, material, and discursive politics, to be the effects of these crises.Various emergent forms of crisis urbanism have emerged over the last several years of ethnographic engagement with the phenomenon of encampments in Paris: Rotating cycles of decampment/emergency sheltering operations, evolving carceral policies and policing practices, as well new forms of municipal humanitarianism and governmental care that brings forms of assistance but also forecloses certain possibilities for rights-claiming and social justice. I begin by showing how encampments become articulations of “urban crisis” and instigate various municipal responses, then explore ways that these autonomous forms of inhabitation, however ephemeral, become spaces of movement, inhabitation and possibility for people caught in the crosshairs of multiple intersecting urban crises that persist and proliferate beyond municipal-technocratic efforts to contain and remove them, and that transform the terms of “crisis”. I trace the political and pragmatic purposes of encampment and their capacities to resist the violence of the permanent temporary and forge hopeful futurities amidst the daily labour of survival in the ruins.