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Celebrating International Day of Persons with Disabilities in Sierra Leone and Indonesia

By Ignacia Ossul Vermehren, on 3 December 2020

By Ignacia Ossul Vermehren (DPU), Nina Asterina (Kota Kita) and Hawanatu Bangura (SLURC)

Abu on the football pitch at Thompson Bay (Sierra Leone). Photo Credit: Angus Stewart

The 3rd of December is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. We reflect on this year’s theme “Building Back Better: toward a disability-inclusive, accessible and sustainable post COVID-19 World” through DPU’s research “AT2030: Community led solutions” in informal settlements Sierra Leone and Indonesia.

While we know that 15% of the world’s population lives with a disability, there is no global data specifically on informal settlements. After conducting the rATA WHO survey last year, we found that 26% of people surveyed across four informal settlements in Indonesia and Sierra Leone experienced at least ‘some difficulty’ in seeing, walking, hearing, remembering and/or communicating. One third lacked the assistive products they needed. Despite being a major issue, disability tends to be overlooked in urban and development research.


The impact of COVID-19 on disabled people in informal settlements

 Between April and August this year, we conducted a research on the impact of COVID-19 on older people and disabled residents in Sierra Leone and Indonesia. Distinct effects emerged, including loss of livelihoods, reduced educational opportunities, unequal access to government support, limited social life and poorer access to information. Moreover, COVID-19 recovery narratives emphasising the importance of ‘healthy bodies’ have exacerbated these difficulties and increased stigma towards disabled people (see video with stories from Indonesia here).

However, the research also highlighted how community-based organisations in the global South are stepping in to provide support, whether through life-saving resources, accessible information, new spaces for disabled people’s participation, or innovative collaborations in the city. As has been the case across the world, the pandemic has brought into focus the experiences of those more vulnerable members of the community.

Making disability visible in communities

 While research in informal settlements has tended to overlook or co-opt the voices of disabled people, making disability more ‘visible’ has its tensions. A first step that challenges rather than reinforces stigma has been to engage with the specific lived experiences and priorities of disabled residents.

 An important output of Phase 1 of the research has shown that the methods, implemented through grassroots organisations with a participatory approach in the communities, can facilitate an emerging collective and positive identity around ‘disability’. Many participants who did not initially want to refer to themselves as disabled, started to see disability as a more positive, political, group identity.  Providing spaces for disabled residents to participate in the wider decision-making process of low-income communities, can further foster solidarity between disabled and non-disabled members of the community.

The leadership of the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (FEDURP) have themselves felt influenced in the way they approach disabled residents. As FEDURP’s country head said in a speech during last year’s Celebration of International Day of Persons with Disabilities: “We knew that disability was a big issue, but we hadn’t engaged with it, neither including disability in the discussion nor working with disabled residents specially. FEDURP is now committed to working with people with disabilities.”

Coming together to foster a political identity around disability

Mural Painting in Pelambuan (Indonesia). Photo credit: Kaki Kota

International Day of Persons with Disabilities has become an important event in giving visibility to disability in the two communities in Sierra Leone. This year, Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre, FEDURP and Dr. Abdulaya Dumbaya (a disability activist and Head of the Springer Trust Fund) will be reflecting on how COVID has affected disabled people, discussing disability rights and sharing stories of resilience in the communities.

In Pelambuan, a low-income neighbourhood in Banjarmasin, Indonesia, the celebrations this year led by NGO Kota Kita will be marked with the painting of a mural on the theme of “Community participation towards an inclusive neighbourhood (kampung)”. The mural aims to translate community voices and aspirations — particularly those with disabilities — and build collective identity through an inclusive approach.

As a physically impaired male participant in Pelambuan said, “I am really happy to participate in this mural project. I like the idea of turning our aspirations into images on the wall. I hope this activity can inspire other neighbourhoods to strengthen their community participation.”

Through making disability more visible, and engaging with tensions that may arise, the research has been able to create space for disabled people to take a shaping role in the community. Recognizing days such as this is an important step in continuing to do so.

 

The action research project “AT2030 Community Led Solutions” is led by DPU’s Julian Walker as part Global Disability Innovation Hub’s programme and funded by UK Aid.

Cultura Negada: Reflecting on Racialised Urban Violence and Practices of Resistance in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

By Federica Risi, on 9 July 2018

Prominent academic debates around violence in the city most often seem to be concerned with how structural economic and political drivers codify violence into the urban space. To appropriate Harvey’s terminology, with how urbanisation by dispossession – in other words marginalisation – of urban groups contributes to increasing crime rates and gangs-related violence. It is only in recent decades that ‘institutional’ abuse  – perpetrated by police forces under the blind eye of the Hobbesian state – as well as more structural forms of selective and – most often –  race-based violence are confronted[1]. And yet as a category of analysis of the urban, violence emerges as a causally less linear and more nuanced construct.

Measurability of course is an issue and deserves being questioned. What indicators are taken into account when defining urban violence? What types of data are considered? Who collects them? How are they read and  disseminated? The action research conducted in Salvador, as part of the MSc Social Development Practice overseas field trip, has evidenced how municipal – and national – indexes reflecting increasing rates of homicides as related to organised-crime, robbery and drug trafficking overlook important aspects of the realities of violence lived everyday by vulnerable urban communities. Vulnerability on its end also warrant a discussion on methodology. Drawing from the Participatory Action Research (PAR) tradition in urban planning, vulnerability is here understood as socially (re)produced and as related to asset ownership (Moser, 1996; drawing on Sen, 1981) and the capacity to cope with shocks; whether environmental, economic, political or all of these combined.

In this blog series, I undress some reflections on how Salvador, the blackest city of Brazil, epitomises such a nuanced appreciation of how violence is urbanised, that is, how it becomes spatially codified in the city;  and in turn is itself an agent of urbanisation. Graffiti[2] is offered as an entry point for the analysis.

 

Aesthetics of inequality. View of Saramandaia, Salvador, Brazil.


In context..

The Bahian capital is a city of contrasts and embodies the clash between the gentrifying force of globalisation as it manifests in the built environment and locally grounded social action reclaiming identity as forgotten history. Identity as ethnicity. Identity as part of the rich African heritage of Brazil and its institutional neglecting. As Kwame Dixon (2016) aptly elucidates in his book Afro-Politics and Civil Society in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, the country abolished legal slavery in 1888, but provided no institutional mechanism to free former slaves from racial discrimination. Almost a hundred years later, when Brazil returned to democracy in the 1980s, burgeoning blocos afros[3], black social and political movements revendicating Afro-Diasporic consciousness emerged to seek racial justice and equality, to claim their ‘right to the city’ as a right to live and exist in the city.

 

Despite having one of the oldest and largest black populations of the Americas, Salvador has never elected a black mayor nor has the Bahian State chosen a black governor to date (Dixon, 2016). And, if urban violence seems to follow the racial and spatially confined pattern of poverty in the city, with residents of majority black, poverty-stricken neighbourhoods being more likely to be killed than their better-off, white neighbours (Chaves Viana et al, 2011; Huggings, 2004); institutional memory as well as public opinion as shaped by the media exert more intangible, narrative forms of violence on these vulnerable groups. These narrative forms of dispossessions become activating agents of citizenship and identity revindication from within the city.

“Minha Vida” – My Life. Graffiti in Barra District, Salvador, Brazil.


I wanted to talk about cultural syncretism, I ended up taking about violence…

It would be amiss to document and account for the richness and multitude of cultural manifestations in Salvador without engaging with how these are shaped by violence in the city, and how, in turn, they impinge on it.

A graffiti tour of Ladeira da Preguiça, literally “Slope of Laziness” helped vividly retrace the institutionalisation of racialised violence in Salvador. In the 17th century, the road, which historically connected the port area[1] (cidade baixa) to the upper city[2] (cidade alta), was used by African slaves to carry goods on their shoulders while being shouted at “to move faster” (Moreira, 2018). With the development of more easily accessible routes in modern[3] Salvador, the Ladeira and its people were abandoned by public power. The area, as a result of its narrow streets and vacant warehouses, slowly lent itself to organised crime and, most recently, to drug-trafficking.

In recent years, the stigma[1] of violence and insecurity –which is almost as damaging as violence itself– eventually provided the perfect justification for the municipality to push forward a privatisation project that was meant to regenerate –and gentrify– the area. Local moradores (“residents”), however, joined forces and, in 2013, collectively mobilised to rehabilitate the Ladeira, reconstructing collapsed mansions and painting decaying façades with colourful graffiti referencing the African Diaspora; exposing Brazil’s institutionalised culture of exclusion as a means to call for the city to remember and for reclaiming their housing rights. A vibrant cultural centre was founded by residents themselves, Centro Cultural “Que Ladeira é Essa?”, to breath a culture of resistance through art. By calling attention to Brazil’s rich African heritage, the centre offers classes of  capoeira, afro-samba dance and percussions as well as painting and graffiti workshops. Cultural offerings then become an element of aggregation, an instrument for articulating a powerful counter-narrative to deconstruct stereotypes.

To say that civic action is a reaction to violence would be simplistic and necessarily reductionist. Nevertheless, the tradition of survivalism through art and symbolism[2] has permeated the urbanisation of Salvador as emerging from the oppression and structural exclusion of black populations within the city (for a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of Brazilian popular culture read: Assunção, 2003).

 

Reflecting on causality

On the one hand, local practices of resistance rooted in the syncretism of Salvador’s condemned[3] neighbourhoods are an unapologetic expression of resistance to the stereotyping narrative of the city. A violent narrative of violence; one that lexically and imaginatively reduces majority black-afro-descendant communities to urban realities of degradation, crime, and carencias (“deprivations”) . A narrative that is reminiscent of colonial oppression and a revivified vehicle of neoliberal domination.

Capoeira dancer. Graffiti in Pelourinho.

 

On the other, it is precisely because of this concatenated cycle of oppression-marginalisation that non-white urban communities find themselves more exposed to violence stemming from their surrounding, built as well as non-built, environments.

 

In this direction, there is room for critical urban theory to expand its scope to explore how violence – and even more so the fear of it – shapes city making. In fact, if market forces and political discourses are key determining factors in the urbanisation of violence, in its physical as well as narrative manifestations, violence too influences how people (re-)claim the city, how they move inside the city, use collective spaces, build or adapt their houses.

 

Our co-investigation with local urban collectives and social movements in Salvador has revealed how urban violence and fear thereof shape the social production of urban habitats and community practices around culture, housing, use and production of collective space and mobility. Further considerations and findings from our field trip will be collated in a report produced with our partner, the research group Lugar Comum, and published in the coming autumn.

 

References

Assunção, M.R. (2003). “From Slave to Popular Culture: The Formation of Afro-Brazilian Art Forms in Nineteenth-Century Bahia and Rio de Janeiro”. Iberoamericana, Vol.3, No.12, pp.159-176.

Dixon, K. (2016). Afro-Politics and Civil Society in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. University Press of Florida.

Huggings, M.K. (2000). “Urban Violence and Police Privatization in Brazil: Blended Invisibility”, Social Justice, Vol.27, No.2, Issue 80, Criminal Justice and Globalization at the New Millennium (Summer 2000), pp. 113-134.

Manco, T., Lost Art, and Neelon, C. (2005). Graffiti Brasil .Thames & Hudson: London.

Moreira, W (2018). Graffiti Tour, Ladeira da Preguiça. 09/05/2018.

Moser, C.O.N. (1996). “The asset vulnerability framework: Reassessing urban poverty reduction strategies”. World Development, Vol.26, No.1, January 1998, pp.1-19.

Moser, C.O.N. (2004). “Urban Violence and Insecurity: an Introductory Roadmap”. Environment and Urbanization, Vol.16, No.2, October 2004.

Resident. (2018). Interview. Graffiti Tour, Ladeira da Preguiça. 09/05/2018.

Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

 

Federica Risi is the Graduate Teaching Assistant of the MSc Social Development Practice. Herself a DPU graduate from the MSc Environment and Sustainable Development, Federica has experience in participatory action research focused on urban risks. She is also a Research Associate at the Pastoral Environmental Network in the Horn of Africa (PENHA), where she is conducting an investigation on South-South Cooperation between Peru, Brazil and the Horn region.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

[1] Residents reported that identifying as black and “saying you are from the Ladeira, it’s like admitting you are a criminal”, which “[…] stops you to get a job and continue education” (Resident, 09/05/2018).

[2] Capoeira  and Candomblé rituals for example, emerged as practice for African slaves to compensate for the loss of identity (Assunção, 2003, p.160).

[3] Carnival Blocks.

[4] In the sense of being publicly perceived as unsafe and rife with violence.

[5] Where Portuguese ships would arrive to deliver materials and goods, historically, the part of the city dedicated to commercial activities.

[6] Here, were established the main government offices and churches; also where the aristocracy resided.

[7] Referring to the end of Portuguese colonial domination and Brazil’s independence in 1822.

[8] In the October 2004 No.2 Issue Vol.16 of Environment and Urbanization, with the article ‘Urban Violence and Insecurity: an Introductory Roadmap’,  Caroline O.N. Moser draws on Galtung to extend the notion of violence as going “beyond situations of overt brutality to include more implicit forms such as exploitation, exclusion, inequality and injustice” (p.6). In this sense “…violence [can be] built into the structure [of society,] …show[ing] up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (Galtung, 1969 cited in Moser, 2004, p.6).

[9] Drawings and writings scribbled or painted through a variety of techniques on public walls; “a vehicle for [the excluded] of the city to assert their existence and self-worth, and to do it loudly” (Manco et al., 2005).

 

What is in a name? Applying critical race and feminist lenses to make knowledge production processes visible

By ucfukpa, on 21 September 2017

The ‘positionality paragraph’ is a ubiquitous part of many a doctoral thesis and journal paper. It tends to list a series of identity attributes that cover the gender, age, nationality and possibly race of the author. The meaning coded into these represent an assumed shared understanding between reader and writer, whereby there is an unspoken invisible communication that suggests one’s gender (for example) affected access to respondents, influenced data analysis and in turn affected the claims one makes of data. The invisibility of epistemological reflexivity drives these bland assuming paragraphs and hides the insidious workings of gender and race particularly in the production of knowledge.

Researcher and respondent at a housing relocation site in Ahmedabad, India

Researcher and respondent at a housing relocation site in Ahmedabad, India

In my paper, What is in a name? How caste names produce situated knowledge, published in Gender, Place and Culture last week, I make visible the reflexive process that reveals the role of gender, race and caste in creating partial and situated knowledge of housing tenure in India. Through the use of three vignettes, two on fieldwork encounters and one on comments from an anonymous reviewer, I examine expectations of knowledge coded in my name and their effects on access to respondents, the disclosure of data and subsequent claims to validity. The paper utilises Bourdieu’s concept of doxa – a pre-reflexive intuitive knowledge – to untangle the effect of names on the research process and on knowledge production. It also applies a critical race lens to problematise the separation of epistemological reflexivity from discussions on positionality.

While I hope all readers will gain something from the paper, it is written for feminist researchers of colour who conduct research away from ‘home’ to help guide us to think through the ways in which we are situated as researchers and the identities to which we are subjected within research that services the western academy. The position from which I reflect and the conclusions I draw are largely absent in the field of critical feminist work on positionality, which is overwhelmingly written by and for white western feminists.

As I write in the paper, “The central purpose of the article is driven by Aisha Giwa’s (2015) critique that most discussions on positionality in research centre on the western academy and the positionalities of white feminist western researchers, and her subsequent call for epistemological reflections on methodology from scholars of colour which might provide different ways of thinking through positionality in fieldwork. Giwa’s discussion touches much larger points that I try to engage with through this article though not directly in this article: the positioning of black and brown bodies in geography research particularly, as research subject in a place and rarely research producers; and for those black and brown bodies that produce knowledge, discouragingly limited conversations about race, culture, epistemology and positionality in social science research, including an acknowledgement that a relationship exists between them and what this relationship might look like.” My paper is a small contribution to a large challenge.

References

Giwa, A. 2015. ‘Insider/Outsider Issues for Development Researchers from the Global South.’ Geography Compass 9(6):316-326.

Patel, K. 2017. ‘What is in a name? How caste names produce situated knowledge.’ Gender, Place and Culture. Doi.10.1080/0966369X.2017.1372385

Reviving cities’ urban fabric through art

By ucfudak, on 1 September 2016

Cities are socio-technical systems, precariously integral, capable of growing as well as becoming smaller and fragmented but still functioning. Even though they have a resilient inherent quality, many cities around the world are witnessing slow death. The reasons could be many – environmental and social degradation, diminishing opportunities for the young population, shifting economic centers, poor governance, loss of character, etc. The dying city is reflected in everything thereafter, in its form, function, and most important the functionaries – the city dwellers. The first sign of decay is visible in the urban form, which instead of undergoing a constant transformation, stops in time and becomes redundant.

Photo 1: Abandoned Township, Lost fervour

Photo 1: Abandoned Township, Lost fervour

Smartening the Cities

The smart city concept brought out by the current government in India, urges planners to design innovative future cities to address the urban transition India is experiencing. In 1900, around 15% of world’s population lived in cities where as in 2015 more than 55% lived in cities. By 2050 it is estimated that 70% of world’s population will be living in cities. According to United Nations, Cities are using only 2% of the entire planet’s land mass and 75% of the world’s natural resources, accounting for approximately 80% of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. The challenge ahead for city planners is to accommodate the 70% population which will be living in cities by 2050 in the 2% of land available to them.

Improved access to global markets, rapid advances in technology, as well as rising expectations of citizens is fueling the growth engines of urbanization. Cities around the world are embracing a smart agenda. There are several definitions of what it means to be a “smart city,” thus giving an opportunity to governments to define their own programs, policies and procedures, responding to their own unique priorities and needs. Famously, the word SMART as an acronym stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based goals. Most of smart city frameworks in the developing world comprise projects and programs that feature smart grids, smart buildings, clean technology and smart governance. However, apart from meeting basic needs, smart cities need to also improve livability, give its citizen a sense of pride, ownership, identity and belonging.

Reviving the urban fabric

Every city has a peculiar character, represented by elements such as smell, form, colour, texture, sound and culture, commonly described as the urban fabric. A smooth texture, a ragged landscape, a dense weave, a focal point, an intriguing maze, etc., all represent the city’s unique character. Thus, just like a fabric, a city also has a print, a pattern and a colour and when it evolves with time, more often than not, it changes these inherent characteristics. In other words, by accommodating migrant population, welcoming new cultures and traditions, the city voluntarily or involuntarily absorbs elements – and loses its basic essence for better or worse.

Delhi is a historic city, between 3000 B.C. and the 17th century A.D seven different cities came into existence in its location. The remnants of each of these seven cities can be seen today in structures such as Gates, Tombs, Water Bodies, Economic Activities and Streetscape, though most features have lost their fervor with time. An organic city by nature, Delhi has seen drastic changes in its urban form. Several rulers conquered Delhi and adorned it with their symbols, Turk introducing Minar, Mughal Domes, Persian coloured tiles, Maratha’s shikhars and British Bungalows with Gardens.

 

Photo 2: Delhi’s old structures peeking out of the evolved streetscape today

Photo 2: Delhi’s old structures peeking out of the evolved streetscape today

 

However, in modern times, the urban design is not dependent on rulers and thus before a city involuntarily transform we need to plan the inevitably transformation. The launch of four flagship Missions (Smart City, AMRUT, HRIDAY and Swachch Bharat Mission) by Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India represents a realization of a paradigm shift which is taking place in addressing the challenges this evolving unplanned urban transition. These interlinked Missions built on broad overarching objective of creating clean, sanitized, healthy, livable, economically vibrant and responsive cities propagate ‘Planning’ as a fundamental tool for providing realistic direction and cohesive development.

The question however still remains – will smart cities revive the decaying urban fabric? The cities of today need a renaissance movement to make them more inviting, sustainable and vibrant. Art can be instrumental in renewing the look of the city and thus the new trend of using graffiti in portraying emotions, conveying messages and giving dimension to the otherwise plain façade is an idea which is fast catching up in cities around the world. An individual’s expression, graffiti – triggers different reactions from onlookers. Where, many relate to them, some also find these obscure and obstructing. Besides, igniting different feelings amongst people they are being welcomed more and more as part of the urban form. In addition to urban features like, street furniture, signage, kiosks and structures; art and colour are becoming popular urban elements reversing the slow death a city is prone to undergo.

Art on the walls of houses, schools and community spaces is not new to India. Women have been painting their homes from outside by drawing specific geometric patterns. Folk art and strings of mystical stories are common illustrations found in villages with lined mud houses, helping to differentiate the otherwise similar looking brown facades.

Photo 3: Traditional paintings on the walls of Rural India.

Photo 3: Traditional paintings on the walls of Rural India.

Continuing with this tradition, Delhi has recently endorsed graffiti on its vertical frame changing the streetscape altogether. One of the first public intervention adopted by the residents of Lodhi Colony in Delhi has helped convert their residential area into an art district. Several Art Volunteers from across the globe have been tasked to reform the plain walls of the residential blocks into masterpieces. The art portrays – mythology, technology, nature, Indian ethnic patterns, future but above all it portrays pride. Pride which every citizen needs to feel for their larger abode – the city in which they live to respect and to protect the space.

Photo 4: Recent promotion of Street Art by international artists in Lodi Colony, Delhi

Photo 4: Recent promotion of Street Art by international artists in Lodi Colony, Delhi

 


Daljeet Kaur is Associate Director – Knowledge Management with IPE Center for Knowledge and Development (http://ipeckd.com/ipeckd). IPE CKD is the knowledge management arm of IPE Global Limited (www.ipeglobal.com), which was established in 2013 to extend the frontiers of knowledge and promote experimentation for innovative solutions to global development challenges. Alongside her work, Daljeet pursues her passion of painting, sketching and drawing under the banner madhURBANi.