A Manifesto for the Just City 2021 36 // 404
INSURGENT PRACTICES OF HOPE & CARE FOR HUMANE URBANISM PROFESSOR FARANAK MIRAFTAB UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, USA. this text is an edited transcript of the lecture given by professor fananak
I
want to first start with a road map of where I’m going to take you today in the next 30 minutes. I am going to talk a little bit about hope, and radical hope or insurgent practices of hope. And a little bit about care and radical care, and what these two things mean for constructing solidarities for a humane urbanism. Then, I will briefly bring those into what has been conceptualized as insurgent planning practices, and then I hope I can take the last five or ten minutes to focus on the importance of imagination for decolonizing futures, which I see in manifestos and the exercise that you all will be involved in in the next month or two, as part of that exercise of imagining a different world, an alternative world, as insurgent practices of hope and care for humane urbanism. So, let me take you with me. I hope I can deliver on this promise. I would like to start with introducing Mariame Kaba. For those of you who don’t know her, she is an organizer, an abolitionist and educator whose work has been to end violence and dismantle the prison industrial complex. Her work with youth and youth leadership development is of a transformative justice nature. I use the notion of hope that Mariama Kaba introduces and articulates as a philosophy of living. She talks about hope as being a discipline feat, as achievement of a daily practice, a daily discipline. She writes and talks about it. [She says] that hope is a discipline that we must practice every single day because in the world we live in today there are so many horrible things happening. Things that I don’t need to remind you of: inequalities, climate change, and all of those things about which it is easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, and there is nothing
that’s ever going to change, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. She says she understands why people might feel hopelessness, but she chooses differently. She chooses to think and act in a different way, believing that there is always a potential for transformation and for change, and that is in any direction. It could be good or bad, but the fact that there is a possibility of change, there is a potential in change, is what helps her in organizing and believing that there are more people who want justice, [there are] those who are working [for justice]. There are more people who want justice than those who are working against it. That’s what motivates her to participate in practices of discipline, what she calls a discipline of hope, helping her to practice for organizing. For her, hope isn’t an emotional hope. It is not optimism. Hope doesn’t preclude feelings of sadness or frustration or anger or any of these other emotions that make total sense. This framing and understanding of hope as discipline is radical in that it is commitment to everyday practices for transformative justice. It is grounded in action that people actually practice all the time. I want to share with you some of the images from when I visited the community of Bom Jardim in Fortaleza, with the help of Professor Clarissa Freitas at the Federal University of Ceará. This community was fighting for their recognition. An informal settlement fighting for recognition. I find inspiration in practices of grassroots and how they resonate with what Kaba calls hope as a discipline, choosing to fight and choosing the potential of change every single day, one day at a time, one door knocked at a time, one flyer posted at a time. They basically cannot afford to give up. It’s these daily practices that ultimately
Professor Faranak Miraftab Photo provided by the author. Printed with permission.
for the manifesto for the just city workshop on 4 OCT 2021 (online)
