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背景下，新冠肺炎揭开了福利国家的外衣，鲜明地揭示了过早死亡在世界各地的分布不均。其中一个受影响的社区是多元文化的伦敦区豪恩斯洛；那里每年有近100人死于糟糕的空气质量，大约400名居民居住在不安全的住房，即所谓的棚屋中(BBC新闻2014；霍恩斯洛议会2020)。这是在这样一个背景下发生的，即附近的希思罗机场既污染了该地区，又依赖于其被低估的关键工人储备(牛津经济学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辅相成的体系，目前全球北方的城市工作不足以理解这一体系。因此，豪恩斯洛要求对“早产”这一术语进行后殖民修订，将其作为一种主观的、具体化的存在方式，并沿着种族路线加以区别分配(巴特勒2011：13)。因此，该项目采用人种学和参与性行动研究方法，挖掘住房、劳动力、环境和健康不确定性之间的联系；询问它们是如何被种族资本主义的不平等逻辑塑造的，它们如何产生一种旷日持久的、不可动摇的生态化暴力，以及居民如何忍受日常的保护策略。

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.