Postcolonial geographies of urban precarity: race, pollution and everyday life in Hounslow

在数十年的紧缩和生态退化的前景下，COVID-19揭开了福利国家的外衣，并清晰地揭示了世界各地过早死亡的不均衡分布。其中一个受影响的社区是多元文化的伦敦区洪斯洛;那里每年有近100人死于空气质量差，约400名居民居住在不安全的住房中，即所谓的“棚内床位”（BBC新闻，2014年;洪斯洛议会，2020年）。这是在附近的希思罗机场污染该地区的背景下，同时取决于其被低估的“关键”工人储备（牛津经济2020）。来自不同种族和宗教背景的居民就财产和劳动力不安全、空气污染和流行病进行谈判;这些问题共同形成了一个相互加强的系统，而目前全球北方的城市工作还不足以理解这个系统。因此，洪斯洛要求对“不稳定性”一词进行后殖民修正，将其作为一种主观的、具体化的存在方式，这种存在方式沿着种族线有差异地分布（Butler 2011：13）。因此，该项目采用民族志和参与行动研究的方法来挖掘住房，劳动力，环境和健康不确定性之间的联系;询问他们如何被种族资本主义的联合国均衡逻辑塑造，他们如何产生一个长期的和无形的生态“缓慢暴力”，以及居民如何通过日常保护策略忍受。

Foregrounded by decades of austerity and ecological degradation, COVID-19 drew back the veneer of the welfare state and revealed with stark clarity the uneven distribution of premature death across the world. One such impacted community was the multicultural London borough of Hounslow; where nearly 100 deaths annually are caused by poor air quality and some 400residents' dwell in insecure housing, so-called beds-in-sheds (BBC News 2014; Hounslow Council2020). This is in a context where nearby Heathrow airport both pollutes the area, whilst depending on its undervalued reserve of 'key' workers (Oxford Economics 2020). Residents from a variety of ethnicities and religious backgrounds negotiate property and labour insecurities, air pollution, and a pandemic; which conspire to form a mutually reinforcing system that current urban work on the global North is inadequate to understand. As such, Hounslow demands a postcolonial revision of the term 'precarity' as a subjective, embodied way of being that is differentially distributed along lines of race (Butler 2011: 13). Thus, this project adopts ethnographic and participatory action-research methods to unearth links between housing, labour, environmental, and health precarities; interrogating how they are shaped by the Un equalizing logics of racial capitalism, how they produce a protracted and invisbilised ecological 'slow violence,' and how residents endure through everydaystrategies of preservation.