This article examines a case of urban displacement currently underway in central Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In some respects, this case represents a classic example of what researchers call ‘downward raiding’: a type of urban displacement whereby low-income housing is exploited by higher-income groups. Yet, in other respects, it also raises important questions about the ways urban displacement happens in public housing, as well as how downward raiding operates on the ground in cities. By exploring these questions, this article aims to accomplish two goals: first, to investigate an overlooked and often hidden form of urban displacement that, in this case, coincides with a large-scale, public–private housing initiative; and, second, to critically interrogate the concept of downward raiding in order to better understand and define the process. It is argued that by placing greater emphasis onhow, empirically speaking, urban displacement happens, researchers may gain new insight into diverse forms of urban displacement in cities around the world.
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‘Life Is Tight Here’: Displacement and Desire amongst Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan
Since the civil war began in 2011, 5.5 million Syrians have fled their home country and are now living as refugees. Building upon anthropological studies of precarity, the article draws upon 14 months of person-centered ethnographic fieldwork to examine the contextual specificities of Syrian women’s protracted displacement in Jordan. By foregrounding bodily experience as described by three interlocutors during person-centered interviews, the article considers how subjectivities are reshaped under such conditions. The narratives analysed here illustrate how the precarity of displacement fosters an embodied sense of tightness, constriction and stagnation while reconfiguring temporal horizons and rendering visions of imagined futures increasingly myopic.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1918350
- PAR ID:
- 10301783
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Anthropology of the Middle East
- Volume:
- 16
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1746-0719
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 49 to 69
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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