Bronx

According to Sabatini (2001), Musset (2009), and Avendaño (2016), Latin American cities have had to deal simultaneously with increasing urbanization and informal economies, land-use conflicts, and tension between crime and imaginaries of fear and insecurity. This has produced, in recent times, “critical zones”, impenetrable territories, “lawless places”, which share the collective socio-spatial symbolization or topo-representation, of being niches of violence and crime. However, it is important to ask how such spaces are generated. The article analyzes the configuration of two of the territories of fear in Bogotá, Colombia: the Cartucho and the Bronx, which have been most stigmatized due to the rates of crime and occurrence of criminal activities. A recent geo-historic perspective was used for the analysis, consisting in the revision of documents in order to gain insight into the topo-representations established regarding the studied zones. This path leads to an understanding of how socio-spatial injustices are produced through the instrumentalization of a collective sense of insecurity. The article concludes that both the emblematic Cartucho and later the Bronx were spaces that arose, to a certain extent, as a result of neoliberal public policies and territorial planning projects gradually implemented in Bogotá.

Urban decline is conventionally framed as a devastating process both for the physical fabric as well as for the social structure of urban communities. Particularly in mass media and popular culture, the common representation of declining urban spaces is dominated by images of physical decay and destitute people as well as narratives of social failure, lack of morality, and crime. These spaces and communities are thus presented as having little to nothing to offer with respect to educational achievement, creative expressivity and intellectual development. Indeed, at the same time as some cities, such as San Francisco and Portland, have become celebrated icons of growth, creative energy and hip intellectualism, others, including Detroit and Newark, seem to have become mired in their image as examples of economic decline, social destitution, and educational apathy. They thus appear to be what social critic Chris Hedges has called " sacrifice zones, " economically exploited, politically abandoned, and socially marginalized areas without hope. Whereas Hedges' critical term implicates structural forces of e.g. neoliberal politics and institutionalized racism in these cities' decline, dominant cultural representations of e.g. the South Bronx of the 1970s and 1980s or contemporary Detroit in photography, film, and TV not only focus on dereliction, decay, and crime, but also tend to lay much of the blame for the decay on the moral, educational, and motivational shortcomings of the people living in these areas, often racial and ethnic minorities. These cultural texts thereby perpetuate the stigmatizing representation by what urban critic Robert Beauregard has called the hegemonic " voices of decline " and fail to acknowledge that declining urban spaces oftentimes open up new opportunities to rethink existing norms, dominant values, and, most importantly, conventional pedagogies.

This panel provides a new take on urban decline by interrogating and elevating the roles and possibilities of education and pedagogy in those spaces. It seeks to uncover popular cultural strategies and educational/pedagogical practices of dissent and resistance to dominant narratives of moral decay and physical decline of places such as Detroit or The Bronx. Looking at particularly visual material and cultural practices, the proposed panel examines the alternative voices and transformative spatial practices emerging from urban decline contexts as forms of discursive resistance that create new physical and imagined spaces in which teaching and learning can happen outside of established institutions. By engaging in an aesthetic of dissent, popular cultural texts and practices are providing possibilities of a subversive and critical reaction to dominant representations of marginalized urban spaces. They thereby engage in a transformative pedagogy that strives to educate and empower disenfranchised local and national communities. These dissenting voices thus challenge and undermine not only notions of apparently morally failing and economically hopeless cities that may be sacrificed but also issue a powerful critique of one-sided hegemonic representations of urban space in general.

Please send your abstract (500 words) and a short biography (350 words), to Eric Erbacher and Sina Nitzsche by 31 May 2017. We look forward to receiving your contributions.