Urbanization, Infrastructure, and Intra-Indigenous Relations

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

The research funded by this award will investigate the consequences of recent global shifts in urbanizing processes. Population mobility, new communications technologies, and volatile property markets underpin changes in cities the world over. This research will look at how these forces come together, how they affect urban life, and how they create new kinds of infrastructures and claims to urban spaces. The overarching research goal is to better understand both causal and experiential dimensions of mobility and urban migration, and to relate these to global dynamics of urbanization and infrastructure development. The research will be conducted by anthropologist Dr. Daniel Fisher of the University of California, Berkeley. Because the transformations to be studied are so broad and interconnected as to be unwieldy from a research perspective, the researcher has chosen to focus his investigations on multiple facets in a single site: Aboriginal urbanization in Darwin, capital of Australia's Northern Territory. He will collect data using an innovative mix of anthropological methods, including: intensive, long-term participant observation to understand the wide variety of lived spaces, experiences, and communities; archival research to track historical developments through administrative records, oral histories, cadastral maps, and photographic materials; collaborative media production to gain insight into everyday aspects of life through the media that are also constitutive of that life; and social and cadastral surveys. Findings from this project will contribute to the comparative study of contemporary urbanization broadly and more specifically to understanding its intercultural and infrastructural properties and their effects on marginalized populations. Funding this project also supports research opportunities for American undergraduate and graduate students. The researcher will produce online and museological exhibitions as well as scholarly publications of his results.