Sister Communities: Rejecting Labels of Informality and Peripherality in Vanuatu

Some labels have dire consequences. This article takes issue with the labels commonly used to describe the physical and social location of communities living on the edge of Port Vila, Vanuatu—labels that position communities for eviction by entrenching tropes of informality and peripherality into ho...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of urban and regional research 2020-11, Vol.44 (6), p.989-1005
Main Author: Day, Jennifer
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accumulation
Articulation
Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-2002)
Capital
Community
Cultural capital
displacement
Ethnography
eviction
Evictions
Foreign aid
formality
informal
International aid
Interviews
Labels
Language
Language policy
Pacific
peri‐urban
postcolonial
settlement
Squatters
Tenure
Urban areas
Urban studies
Urbanization
Vanuatu
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Some labels have dire consequences. This article takes issue with the labels commonly used to describe the physical and social location of communities living on the edge of Port Vila, Vanuatu—labels that position communities for eviction by entrenching tropes of informality and peripherality into how they are seen and represented. Such terms include informal, settlement, informal settlement, squatter and peri‐urban. Based on interviews with around 100 people and two years of ethnographic engagement with urban communities in Port Vila, Vanuatu, I critique the language of policy against the lived experience of those at the urban edge. I use Bourdieu's articulation of power as an accumulation of symbolic capital that enables one to speak the world into being. I conclude that the language of policies and plans is reflective of a dominant discourse in urban studies and international aid, and non‐reflective of the experience and identities of people living at the urban edge. My interviewees and interlocutors maintain their identities as sister communities—as places grounded in the formality of customary tenure, and as part of the city rather than outside it.
ISSN:0309-1317
1468-2427
DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12965