Governing Death in the City: Urban Care, Precarity, and Pluriversal Futures
Convener: Hestu Prahara
Co-convener: Toetik Koesbardiati
Cities across the Global South are reshaping not only how people live, but also how they die. Rapid urbanisation—marked by rising population density, chronic land scarcity, expanding bureaucratic systems, and deepening health inequalities—has transformed the governance of death into a crucial yet underexamined dimension of urban life. End-of-life care, funerary practices, burial and cremation infrastructures, and the social management of grief are increasingly shaped by overlapping forces of municipal regulation, religious authority, market logics, and community-based solidarities. These shifts raise urgent questions about how dignity, care, and belonging are negotiated at the end of life in contexts marked by precarity and structural constraint. This panel invites papers that explore how death is organised, regulated, contested, and cared for in cities, and how these processes illuminate the coexistence of multiple cosmologies, moral worlds, and visions of what constitutes a meaningful or “proper” death. We welcome ethnographic and interdisciplinary contributions that examine diverse aspects of urban death governance, including but not limited to:
• palliative and end-of-life care in informal settlements and other marginalised urban spaces;
• neighbourhood, kinship, and religious solidarities that shape who takes responsibility for the dead;
• the commercialisation, commodification, and privatisation of death services;
• the role of digital identification systems, insurance, and bureaucratic documentation in determining access to funerary rites;
• spatial politics of cemeteries, cremation grounds, and mortuary infrastructures amid competing land-use priorities;
• and tensions between biomedical, religious, and local understandings of what constitutes a “good death.”
By foregrounding death governance as an analytical lens, this panel seeks to open conversations on pluriversal urban futures—futures in which multiple ways of caring for the dying, honouring the dead, and supporting the bereaved can coexist. We aim to explore how urban residents, institutions, and spiritual communities navigate and creatively reconfigure the end of life, offering new insights into justice, care, and the human condition in an increasingly multipolarising world.