Moriconi, Sofia (2021) HUMANITARIAN SPACE AND URBAN PROCESS. THE TRANSFORMATIVE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN THE CAMP AND THE CITY. [Tesi di dottorato]

Preview

Text Moriconi_Sofia_33.pdf Download (12MB) | Preview

Collection description

This research focuses on Humanitarian Space as a "capturing assemblage" of global migratory flows and an emerging City trait. Referring to a specific dispositive that several scholars call "Camp" and a vast literature describe as the space of "Otherness" and humanitarian emergency, I demonstrate how the Humanitarian Space is constantly and increasingly involved in urban processes, producing a specific territory and a related subjectivity. The Camp has been considered a spatial racializing tool of government, paradigmatic of the current age. It is globally widespread as a western tool of managing excess populations but mainly conceived as a finite subject with a limited spatial manifestation: an enclave with specific features. Simultaneously, as recent anthropological literature has demonstrated, humanitarian morality is influencing governmentality and political discourse since the second part of the Twentieth century. Moreover, advanced capitalism increasingly functions producing surplus through the exploitation of zoé, the pure, biological animality of life. In this work, I draw on post-anthropocentric and feminist theoretical references to illustrate how humanitarian spaces are entirely part of the productive urban mechanism as specific dispositive for the production of human zoé. Through a theorization derived from an ethnographic-inspired study of power dynamics in a typical Camp of the Italian Reception System, I outlined a new definition of Humanitarian Space as a machinic assemblage. In particular, I described this spatial dispositive through a diagram of power that highlights the constitutive forces and their convergence towards a survival threshold dictated by humanitarian standards. Subsequently, I analysed how the elaborate power diagram took shape in a spread and complex urban contest. I highlighted how the convergence between the Humanitarian Space and Urban process makes humanitarian assemblage a complex heterogeneous infrastructure producing a zoé-related urban territory. At the same time, this convergence allows overcoming the one-way downbeat ending that sees bodies and things destined for oppression and depoliticization in a state of survival. For these reasons, the research aims to underline how Humanitarian Space can no longer be defined as an "enclave" or "Anti-City" and demonstrate how it works through performative and transformative combinations of spaces and bodies and objects in circulation in urban processes. In particular, it is my goal to outline alternative strategies for planning and managing the Humanitarian Space - first in the metropolitan region of Naples, then replicable to a broader territorial dimension - which seems to increasingly contaminate practices and logics of urban governance, quickly replacing welfare strategies and policies.

Downloads

Actions (login required)

View Item