Abstract
Contemporary urbanism can be characterized by a paradox: It has to depend on a range of precarious spaces—for instance, industrial plants, nuclear power stations, incinerators, landfills: built forms that are critical to the stable functioning of the city—but these spaces also manufacture hazards and risks that destabilize the city. In this chapter, the ethical relationships between precarious spaces, and precarious subjects (i.e., the people living near to these spaces) are redescribed through not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) conflicts on hazardous facility siting. However, precarious subjects have special vulnerabilities that entail unique obligations—vulnerabilities that are at once exacerbated by precarious spaces but obligations that are better safeguarded by these same spaces. This tension then suggests a moral dilemma unique to the emerging condition of precarity.
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Chan, J.K.H. (2019). Precarity. In: Urban Ethics in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0308-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0308-1_2
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