International Webinars 2021

Emerging Scholar Series

Event 1 Huraera Jabeen, Ph.D.

Gendered space and climate resilience in informal settlements in Bangladesh

Abstract Climate resilience in cities varies significantly based on gender and on location in different physical and social spaces. It is argued that spatial injustice produces uneven power relations, which in turn lead to asset differentials, which affect adaptability and transformability (i.e. resilience to climate change) which thus produces environmental injustice – a vicious circle. A qualitative approach in exploring space usage patterns in informal settlements in Bangladesh demonstrates, how the appropriation of private, parochial, and public spaces by residents of informal settlements influence their capacity to cope with climate risks. Because of the spatial implications of the predominant patriarchal system, women remain vulnerable in private spaces. The parochial spaces they use for productive work also leave them exposed and sensitive to climate hazards. On the other hand, men, who make greater use of public spaces, still have the negligible capacity to take any anticipatory and reactive actions in response to risks there. Gendered constraints in both inhabiting and shaping spaces in informal settlements, thus, is an underlying cause of differential climate resilience. Alternatively, planning climate-resilient spaces can be a path for transformative adaptation.

March 31, 2021 / Wednesday / 2 to 3 pm (Melbourne time)

Event 2 Chester Arcilla, Ph.D.

Un-homing the Urban Poor: Socialized Housing, Displacements and Subaltern Resistances in the Philippines

Abstract

In this presentation, I explicate the political-economy of the Philippine socialised housing program and its implications on subaltern resistances. The socialised housing program provides the relocation required legally for evictions of informal settlements. Compelling slum dwellers to purchase unlivable and unaffordable housing in remote peri-urban sites, the program privatises profits, socialises risks and costs, and curtails democratic participation. Urban subalterns respond with diverse resistances ranging from quiet encroachment to an Occupy movement. Here, quiet encroachment for in-city home-remaking after evictions requires the break up of families, negotiations with slum gatekeepers and community support. Many slum communities have also countered with people’s planning for on-site upgrading or near-site resettlement, achieving some success with the support of allied NGOs and state ‘champions.’ However, the people’s plans are constrained by the limits of housing subsidies and often excluded the poorer slum dwellers. In 2017, a progressive coalition of urban poor groups enacted one of the largest empty socialised housing takeovers in the Global South. This occupation may signal a shift from defensive anti-eviction protests and barricades to an offensive strategy for urban resource redistribution in the Philippines.

April 28, 2021 / Wednesday / 2 to 3 pm (Melbourne time)

Zoomlink: https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/81012133227?pwd=V3ZlU0UwSFd0V1dKRGp3M0htb1gvQT09

Password: 092716

Event 3 Helen Gyger, Ph.D.

Improvised Cities: Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru

Abstract Beginning in the 1950s, an explosion in rural-urban migration dramatically increased the population of cities throughout Peru, leading to an acute housing shortage and the proliferation of self-built shelters clustered in barriadas, or squatter settlements. Improvised Cities examines the history of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self-builders, which took on a variety of forms in Peru from 1954 to 1986. While the postwar period saw a number of trial projects in aided self-help housing throughout the developing world, Peru was the site of significant experiments in this field and pioneering in its efforts to enact a large-scale policy of land tenure regularization in improvised, unauthorized cities. Gyger focuses on three interrelated themes: the circumstances that made Peru a fertile site for innovation in low-cost housing under a succession of very different political regimes; the influences on, and movements within, architectural culture that prompted architects to consider self-help housing as an alternative mode of practice; and the context in which international development agencies came to embrace these projects as part of their larger goals during the Cold War and beyond.

May 26, 2021 / Wednesday / 2 to 3 pm (Melbourne time)

Zoomlink: https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/85026557001?pwd=aXVicUYyK1JSYm5SeFJuVzhNaTNVdz09

Password: 555934