Loading...
Please wait, while we are loading the content...
Fragmentation as a Threat to Social Cohesion? A Conceptual Review and an Empirical Approach to Brazilian Cities
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Deffner, Veronika Hoerning, Johanna |
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | Our paper reflects on urban fragmentation as a theoretically only poorly outlined and empirically hardly analyzed concept with regard to its production and perception in daily practices. When reviewing social science literature, the abundance of different usages of the term is striking, either related to the transformation of social structures and experience, or to morphological, territorial and geographical structures and how they again relate to social structures (in terms of socio-spatial analysis), as well as decentralizing changes in power relations. Urban fragmentation has to be queried as both a process of deconstructing the perception of a former urban 'entirety' and of reconstructing a fragmentary urban space, as well as the fragmentary state of interwovenness of those parts that form urban societies and their space. In drawing upon Brazilian cities and the perception of favelas as 'disordering fragments', we will develop a perspective that seeks to combine the analysis of fragmentation as a perceived threat with a focus on daily social practice. This, we believe, is an important task of research to understand fragmentation which, so far, has been generally outlined from the viewpoint of globalizing networks and the isolation of urban elites, where favelas are being constructed as the 'rest' or threatening 'other'. Concerning Brazilian favelas, we may conclude that their disconnection lies in the fact that their inhabitants pursue lifestyles and life choices (e.g. leisure time, social networks) that are very focused on the favela's space, whereas interwovenness is primarily produced in economic and work-related aspects. Current debates on urban realities claim that today’s cities suffer from ongoing processes of fragmentation. As an operational term, urban fragmentation is used by scientists to describe the phenomenon of increasingly differentiated societal and spatial polarization within cities, which seems yet difficult to grasp or to calculate in its further dimensions and effects. Thus, fragmentation seems to represent a threat to social cohesiveness on a political-planning as well as on a subjective-perceptive level. Our paper starts from the assumption that the concept of urban fragmentation is theoretically only poorly outlined so far and empirically hardly analyzed with regard to its production and perception in daily practices. To point out the potentials and pitfalls of the term, we start by reviewing the conceptualizations within sociological and geographical research, and their empirical relevance for the understanding of cities as socially constructed products. Concerning urban societies, the “fragmented city” seems to replace terms like the “dual/divided city” or the “quartered city”, but it is unclear if this fragmentation is seen to be the new structural socio-spatial form, or if it is a mere temporary and auxiliary term for a process which is threatening us by its new complexity due to the sizes of cities today. Within this context, we seek to combine geographical and sociological approaches, as we believe the disciplinary disconnection to be a source of the 1 Deffner, Hoerning: Fragmentation as a Threat to Social Cohesion? ambiguity of the term. As a new analytical term, the theoretical and empirical validity of fragmentation concerning social, economic, political, and spatial structures is not yet clear. To shed some light on the term as a conceptual tool, our paper addresses fragmentation empirically in the context of Brazilian cities, focusing on the daily life in its apparently most “threatening fragments”, the favelas. Thus, we will critically question if and how fragmentation is produced in daily social practice. Through their everyday-life practices, favela-dwellers connect different living and working realities (e.g. domestic workers, doormen). These de facto existing different realities cannot be seen as disconnected, but must be analyzed with regard to their interrelations. Speaking of fragmentation, though, involves the risk of conceptualizing individual fragments by their disconnections rather than by their connections. Single fragments thereby are being evaluated differently in terms of their possible threat or not to social order. 1. Conceptual reflections – the fragment as witness/evidence, representation and indicator Reviewing social science literature on the term or engaged with the phenomenon of fragmentation, the abundance of different usages is striking. Francoise NavezBouchanine (2002a, b) has offered a rich overview of the history of the term itself and the different forms of understanding. She distinguishes between approaches to fragmentation as a general social or societal phenomenon, the fragmentation of urban form as a physical-spatial and as a socio-spatial phenomenon, and political fragmentation (Navez-Bouchanine 2002b). In the first case, we might think of fragmentation as a new or newly accentuated term for social structures. The second and third relate to morphological, territorial or geographical structures and how they again relate to social structures. The fourth, sociologically speaking, analyzes decentralizing changes in power relations. If we look at the current topics or fields of social science research that refer to fragmentation as one of the defining characteristics and that coincide in a number of ways, we may find four main areas: research on globalization, on new media and the so-called information society, urban studies, and development theory. Still, fragmentation is not a new term – it appears together with conceptualizations of pluralization and differentiation of modern societies long before it experienced a renaissance within theorizations of late, radical or reflexive modernity and post-modernities. When dealing with a term that suffers from multiple usage and seems so difficult to grasp, it comes as a useful tool to reflect upon its etymology to concentrate on its original meaning, in order to avoid connotations or metaphorical meanings for a moment: Fragment (Latin fragmentum), of course, means “broken piece”, to fragment (Latin frangere) “to fall to pieces”, or simply “to break”. Fragmentation, therefore, refers to both, the fragment as a result of the cleavage and the process of breaking into pieces. The fragment appears as part of an original entity which may no longer appear as such. There is, we might conclude, a dialectic relation between deconstruction and reconstruction (Brunner 1997, 13), the fragment evidencing a former, deconstructed entity, representing a current state or at least its perception, and indicating a process of reconstructing a newly emerging pattern. The connecting aspect between past, present and future is (social) heterogeneity: it may not only be seen as a consequence of fragmentation, but also as its cause (cf. Holtz-Bacha 1998). 2 Deffner, Hoerning: Fragmentation as a Threat to Social Cohesion? Research on fragmentation should, therefore, correlate these three elements, a former entity, a current perception, and an emerging pattern. If both, the deconstructing process and its consequent pattern, may be seen as fragmentary, will depend on social practice. Where the former entity is perceived as fragmented, deconstructed, non-existing, an emerging pattern is being reconstructed in daily social practice. Classic sociological approaches on social structuring have related to fragmentation as a process of disordering, in the sense of a dismantling and a disaggregation of formerly coherent societal structures. Fragmentation may either appear as a temporary re-structuring with fragments as remnants of former structures, or as an intrinsic process of increasingly polarized modern (and postmodern) societies with fragments as both, highly interrelated and disconnected parts of society as a whole. In the first case, fragmentation as a term is related to a lack of understanding of newly emerging structures. In the second, it seems to disguise or negate hierarchical structures of society, which have to be analyzed in their specific power-related capacities and the social significance of spatial production. The central question is whether fragmentation may be seen as the new pattern underlying sociospatial structures or even as the new mode of societal differentiation? We claim that the answer may only be found by analyzing daily social practice as related to but not coincident with perception and discursive narratives. Fragmentation as a term should not obscure hierarchies and inequalities of social heterogeneity, but help to analytically distinguish disconnections and interwovenness of societal parts that differ in terms of their power to manipulate socio-spatial structures and patterns, even though they may all be essential to their daily production. It is, thus, the dialectic relationship between deconstruction and reconstruction, as well as between connection and disconnection, that underlies the analytical potential of the term. 2. On fragmentation within sociological and geographical thought Social heterogeneity is an elementary characteristic of social structures, a structure comprising different, but interrelated parts (Blau 1977, 2). Hence, the task of sociological analysis is to understand and explain processes of distinction and connection that produce and reproduce certain social structures. Classic sociological analyses have described social structures from a macroperspective as evolving from segmentary to differentiated societies (Durkheim 1977 [1893]), but the differentiation of modern societies has been understood from different angles and levels of analysis in numerous ways: social classes and strata, functional and rational differentiation, social milieus and lifestyles, to name the most prominent. There has been, though, a tendency to describe social structures as increasingly fragmented, breaking up the former social, cultural, economic and political fractions of society. This “radicalization |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.rc21.org/conferences/amsterdam2011/edocs2/Session%2015/15-1-Deffner.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
