Co-housing childhoods: parents’ mediation of urban risk through participation in intentional communities

Co-housing is a form of intentional community that encourages shared living and sees members jointly build and develop urban housing projects. Through an emphasis on traffic-free developments and reference to strong community sentiment, co-housing is construed by parents as providing a safer and more desirable location for raising children. Drawing on fieldwork in two Canadian co-housing developments, this paper demonstrates how parents are able to mediate risks associated with traffic, bullies, and strangers.     

Public space and memories of migration: erasing diversity through urban redevelopment in France

This article examines the meaning of public space and impact of heritage-led urban redevelopment in a diverse neighbourhood in Montpellier, France. It traces the relocation of a North African market from a central city plaza in favour of French antiques, and the resulting contestation over what constitutes local heritage, who has the capacity to determine how public space is used, and the seeming erasure of migrant identities and memories from an important community site. The paper considers how urban areas are re-imagined through a change in the materiality of public space, and outlines the role of outdoor markets in defining the social function of such spaces. The paper examines the intertwining of physical erasure (urban redevelopment and the removal of a diverse food market) and cultural erasure (the loss of certain community memories), and how these processes speak to broader debates about French national identity, cultural heritage, and the meanings attached to public spaces.     

The Covid-19 app and the fire spirit: Receiving messages in Britain and Siberia

The UK's National Health Service Covid-19 ‘track and trace’ app was designed as a critical public health technology. So why has it encountered so much resistance? The authors compare alerts on the phone regarding exposure to possible Covid-19 infection with messages from a Siberian nomad's domestic fire, which sometimes crackles warnings of potential illnesses or accidents. Though these prediction technologies may seem radically different, they are both instruments for thinking about possible futures and adjusting behaviour. The authors interpret them as forms of divination that differ not so much in their logic as in their embeddedness in wider cosmologies of person, fate and society. The Siberian fire generates meaning as a focal point of coherence within many narrative strands concerning family and landscape; acceptance of its messages is rooted in intimacy and entanglement. This highlights how the Covid-19 app belongs to a state of emergency and exception. Its statistical idiom of risk and its culturally hyper-valued focus on privacy conceal the identities of people caught in the chain of infection, blocking social and narrative coherence and thereby encouraging suspicion and cynicism.