Descrizione del progetto
Studiare il «vuoto» nelle città e nei villaggi post-socialisti
In città e villaggi di Paesi ex socialisti abbandonati da capitale, abitanti e stato si osserva il fenomeno del «vuoto», soggetto a discorsi popolari e accademici che lo hanno definito come la distruzione della vita materiale, sociale ed economica, da cui deriva la sua politicizzazione o estetizzazione. Tuttavia, le ragioni e la forma politica del vuoto non sono ancora pienamente compresi. Il progetto Emptiness, finanziato dall’UE, studierà il ritiro di capitale, stato e abitanti in Lettonia, Ucraina, Russia e Bielorussia esaminando le esperienze, le narrazioni, la politica e la governance del vuoto e dello svuotamento. Il progetto analizzerà il rapporto tra capitale, stato, abitanti e luogo, concentrandosi sull’ipotesi che gli interessi politici ed economici si stiano spostando verso le «città globali», mentre gli altri spazi urbani e non urbani stiano diventando sempre più disconnessi.
Obiettivo
This project proposes to study “emptiness” as a concrete historical formation that has emerged in conditions when socialist modernity is gone and promises of capitalist modernity have failed. It is developed on the basis of the following observations: (1), many towns and villages across the former socialist space are being abandoned by capital, the state, and people; (2), there is a proliferation of popular and scholarly imaginaries and discourses of emptiness as the ruination of material, social, and economic life, and the coming of a radically different future; (3), emptiness and emptying are politicized, with some political actors pointing to the risks of emptying and others considering narratives of emptying as themselves threatening to the existing political order; and (4), despite—or because—of politicization, emptying is subject to governance, as in the case of “shrinking cities” in East Germany. And yet, the material, social, and political contours of emptying and emptiness are poorly understood. This has considerable effects for how people act upon the concrete challenges that emptying and emptiness present.
The project mobilizes emptiness as an emic discursive figure derived from ethnographic research in the Latvian-Russian borderlands to study the withdrawal of the state, capital, and people in Eastern Ukraine, the Russian Far East, and Belarus. The project aims to: (1), study the experiences and narratives of emptiness and emptying; (2), examine the politics and governance of emptying and emptiness; and (3), use postsocialist “emptying” and “emptiness” as lenses for analyzing global reconfigurations of relations between capital, the state, people, and place. It argues that postsocialist emptying and emptiness prefigure emergent spatial organization of economic and political life, whereby capital flows and statecraft are increasingly concentrated in “global cities,” with the rest of urban and non-urban spaces becoming radically disconnected.
Campo scientifico
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantIstituzione ospitante
OX1 2JD Oxford
Regno Unito