Precarious placemaking

Abstract

This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the concepts of precarity and precariousness. In recent years, precarity has become a widespread empirical and theoretical concern across the humanities. The article traces the simultaneous rise alongside precarity of network and ontology as post-place-based frameworks for anthropological analysis. Although these new frames facilitate anthropological explorations in the spirit of the times, this review argues that both network and ontology lack the capacity to identify what is being transformed and what is at stake when and where precarity takes hold. To see models of placemaking as spaces of transformative possibility requires an account of coexisting, qualitatively distinctive forms of relationship to places.