Uncertain futures and everyday hedging in a humanitarian city

Abstract

In this paper, I take up diverse ways in which the uncertain future mobilises action in the now, and consider what kinds of socialities and economies such actions toward the future produce. Thinking from the vantage point of Juba, South Sudan, I show how the openness of space and time to emergence shape the everyday practices of anticipating, hedging for and living through a future and present that is radically uncertain. I argue that the defining features of such everyday hedging are (i) an implicitly spatial frame of comparison, (ii) a fraught interdependence between lack of reliable knowledge and calculative practices and finally (iii) their capacity to generate value in the face of risk. I consider futurity and elsewheres as modalities of difference – that is, as conditions for the unfolding of becoming and the emergence of the new, as well as requirements for surprise. Although Juba may be considered a limit case, I argue that practices of everyday hedging – whatever their particularities – are critical to better understanding futurity and the complex socialities on which the economic relies.

Intraurban development in a city under protracted armed conflict: Patterns and actors in Goma, DR Congo

“…analyzed in the literature within this conceptual framework, revealing interesting parallels with our case (Büscher et al, 2018, Newhouse, 2017, Branch, 2013. International NGOs play a big role in shaping Goma's cityscape due to their collective impact on the urban economy, politics, and the built environment.…”

“…Other studies outline how living conditions deteriorate and cities depopulate due to armed conflict (Omasombo, 2005), or show how tensions worsen through conflictaccelerated urban growth, which in turn can lead to (conflict-induced) real estate booms (Branch, 2013, Peyton, 2018a. Some studies of African cities in conflict demonstrate how urban inhabitants deal with insecurity on a daily basis (Oldenburg, 2010, Oldenburg, 2012; analyze how the influx of international aid agencies creates a 'humanitarian urbanism'; show how long-term, large-scale refugee camps turn into permanent settlements (Jansen, 2016; and portray how migrants intentionally move to cities at the center of war, seeing the potential for economic opportunities (Newhouse, 2017. Urban research in (post-…”

Geographies of uncertainty

“…This is not to say that human geographers have not recently taken up many of the substantive themes that are of interest in transdisciplinary debates. Indeed, engagements with experiences of liminality, protracted uncertainty and indeterminacy within the subdiscipline have become increasingly wide-ranging in their ambit, investigating questions on migration and refugee resettlement ( Loyd et al, 2018 , Mountz et al, 2002 ), development ( Chung, 2017 , Chung, 2020 ), climate futures and the Anthropocene ( Nightingale, 2018 ), neoliberalism ( Anderson et al, 2020 ), identity and selfhood ( March, 2020 ), and humanitarianism ( Newhouse, 2017 ).…”

Brexit: Modes of uncertainty and futures in an impasse

“…To achieve such an orientation, we learn from and develop recent work on 'future geographies' which demonstrates how uncertainty surfaces as a particular kind of affectively and materially present problem that is variously mitigated, accepted, embraced, denied, or otherwise lived with (see Newhouse, 2017;Thieme, 2017). This gives us a starting point for differentiating between 'modes of uncertainty' as well as a question for work on Brexit as a particular kind of event: through what forms does uncertainty register as a specific problem that, in part, constitutes the sense of the present?…”