Jutta Bakonyi

14. November 2023,18:00 CET

The talk introduces Jutta Bakonyi’s and Pete Chonka’s new monograph ‘Precarious Urbanism. Displacement, Belonging and the Reconstruction of Somali Cities’ (Bristol University Press, 2023). Building on narrative interviews and photo-voice the book discusses the nexus of displacement and urbanisation in four Somali cities: Hargeisa in Somaliland, and Bosaso, Baidoa and Mogadishu in Somalia. We follow the reasons and routes of displacement before we analyse the micro-political economy that underpin urban settlements but also drive dynamics of evictions and gentrification. While we show that displaced persons are active agents of city making, we also critically engage with the discursive construction of the Internally Displaced Person (IDP) and show how this label exerts power and structures socio-economic inequalities and the politics of belonging in the four cities.

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