London National Park City: a panel discussion

Date and time
Monday 15th March 2021
17.00 to 18.30

Location
Online event

London National Park City: a panel discussion


Participants

  • Cara Clancy (University of Plymouth)
  • Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge)
  • Daniel Raven-Ellison (Guerrilla Geographer and National Park City campaigner)
  • Meredith Whitten (London School of Economics)
  • Judy Ling Wong (Black Environment Network and National Park City Foundation)

 

Theorising urban studies on/from China/Asia

Date and time
25 February 2021
2-3.30 PM GMT

Location
Online event

Theorising urban studies on/from China/Asia

Speakers
Julie Ren (University of Zurich) and Yimin Zhao (Renmin University of China)

Discussants
Jennifer Robinson (UCL) and Hyun Bang Shin (LSE)

Co-organisers
Hyun Bang Shin (LSE) and Matthew Gandy (Cambridge)

Registration
The event is free to attend but pre-registration is required.

Register now


 

One of the major on-going debates and challenges in critical urban scholarship is related to the call for de-centring knowledge production, especially the emphasis on the need of ‘theorising’ from outside the Global North. What can we learn from this endeavour to re-assert the importance of southern cities, and are there any limitations in our existing practices? Does the focus on a select number of southern cities result in replicating the extant shortfalls of urban studies from the Global North? In this Urban Salon event, we consider these questions by inviting contributions from scholars who have engaged with urban China studies situated in larger debates on Asian urbanism.

 

Exceptionalism and theorising from Urban China

Julie Ren

A review of segregation research on Chinese cities presents several intertwined findings: Chinese cities are framed in terms of their difference, mostly in contrast to Euro-American cities. In translating the findings, the research often resorts to a methodological nationalism, which contextualises Chinese cities in terms of their “Chinese-ness,” a reductionist heuristic that elides the diversity of these cities and renders residential segregation incommensurate with the experience of cities elsewhere. The effect of this is to limit the potential of this research to contribute to a “more global urban studies,” by inscribing a kind of exceptionalism into Chinese cities. 

 

Towards a translational turn in urban studies

Yimin Zhao

Engaging with reflections on improper urban vocabularies, this talk wants to introduce a “translational turn” to foreground dialogues—rather than equivalences—between languages. To better capture global urban experiences, we should recognise the role of translation that exposes us to strangeness and alterity. Drawing on hermeneutics and the philosophy of language, I suggest “the fusion of horizons” could become a new perspective to redefine translation where different languages encounter each other. This point is elaborated with heterogeneous names of the urban frontier, which inform us how and how far appropriating gaps/distances can initiate creative and unexpected dialogues for more global urban studies.

 

Short bio

Julie Ren is a Senior Scientist at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich. Formerly a Fulbright Fellow, she also held postdoctoral fellowships at the City University of Hong Kong and the London School of Economics. Her research considers the potential of comparative urban research for redressing existing modes of urban theorization. Currently, she is researching the contemporary art biennial in Dakar and Taipei to explore questions of cultural representation, public space, and la ville événementielle. Her most recent book is Engaging Comparative Urbanism: Art Spaces in Beijing and Berlin (Bristol University Press, 2020).

Yimin Zhao is an Assistant Professor in Urban Planning and Management at Renmin University of China. Trained as a human geographer, his research has been associating with the theme of space and politics in the urban change. After completing previous investigations on Beijing’s green belts and Jiehebu, his current research develops along two lines of inquiry, one focusing on the infrastructural lives of authoritarianism in Beijing, and the other looking into the urban mechanisms of “Global China.”

Glissant and Black Urbanism

Date and time
Thursday 27 February 2020
17.00 – 18.30

Location
Centre Building Room CBG.1.06
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE

Glissant and Black Urbanism

Speaker
Garth A. Myers, Trinity College Hartford CT USA

Discussant(s)
Jennifer Robinson, UCL

Chair
Hyun Bang Shin, LSE


The poems, essays and novels of the late Edouard Glissant rely on both a keen spatiality and a postcolonial sense of relationality. Glissant’s work is often difficult to decipher or contradictory, and engagement with his work in geography is still rare – albeit increasing in works tied to the study of Black Geographies and Black urbanism. I see many opportunities for urban geographers to engage with his thinking productively. Over his long career, he created what Nesbitt (2013: 239) called the ‘single most developed and philosophically sophisticated body of work in the tradition of Caribbean critique’. In this talk, I examine how Glissant’s take on transversality, submarine relationality, planetarization and his own notions of the ‘whole-world’, ‘creolization,’ ‘archipelagic thought,’ and the importance of landscape can create new visions for rethinking urbanism from the global South. The talk is built from my forthcoming book, Rethinking Urbanism: Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South (June 2020, Bristol University Press), which relies on Glissant in significant ways.

Speaker Bio

Garth A. Myers, associated with the Center for Urban and Global Studies, is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies. Garth Myers earned a Ph.D. in Geography (1993) from UCLA with an allied field in Urban Planning. Myers has an M.A. (UCLA, 1986) in African Area Studies, with Geography and Urban Planning as the major and minor fields, and a BA with Honors in History from Bowdoin College, with concentrations in African and African-American History. He has taught at the University of Kansas, University of Nebraska-Omaha, Miami University (Ohio), California State University at Dominguez Hills, and UCLA. Myers is comfortable with large lecture classes and small seminars. His teaching philosophy rests on a belief in student engagement; the best learning takes place in engaged classrooms, where the professor facilitates student discussion and debate. Myers has conducted research in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, South Africa, Finland, and the UK over the past 20 years, and he regularly uses his research to inform his teaching.

Living Through Uncertain Times

Date and time
Wednesday 19 February 2020
17.30 – 19.30

Location
Queen Mary University of London
 2.22 Graduate Centre
Mile End Campus
London E1 4DH

Living Through Uncertain Times

Speakers
Michele Lancione (University of Sheffield), Constance Smith (University of Manchester)

RSVP on Eventbrite


Across the world, cities are facing crisis on multiple fronts, putting the conditions for everyday life under tremendous pressure. Urban inhabitants are forced to recon with abstract processes of change in part by establishing informal networks of care and social infrastructures of support. Exploring the emergence of such improvisatory practices, networks, collectives and gatherings, this seminar asks: How can critical urban scholarship develop more rigorous approaches to conceptualise, question and contribute to improving the conditions for urban life to flourish in times of uncertainty?

The Urban Salon with The QMUL City Centre invites Michele Lancione (University of Sheffield) and Constance Smith (Social Anthropology, University of Manchester) to address these topics. Following their talks, there will be an open discussion on the theme of living through uncertain times.

 

More about the speakers:

Michele Lancione is an urban ethnographer and activist interested in issues of marginality, diversity, and radical politics. His most recent writing has focused on homelessness, racialised displacement and underground life in Bucharest, Romania. Michele is member of the Common Front for the Right to Housing (FCDL), and corecipient of two Antipode Awards. He is also one of the founders and Editors of the open-source Radical Housing Journal (RHJ), an Editor of City, and Corresponding Editor for Europe at IJURR. He is based at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield (UK), where he is commencing work on a 5-year European Research Council funded program on ‘Radical Housing’.

Michael’s talk will be: Recentering the politics of home. Notes from within and from below

Constance Smith is a UKRI Future Leader Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where her research focuses on the anthropology of architecture, time and urban change. Exploring shifting landscapes of buildings, planning and infrastructure, her work examines how urban materialities influence temporal engagements. She holds a PhD from UCL and an MA from Columbia University.

Connie’s talk will be: Nairobi in the making: precarious architecture, ‘world-class’ futures and urban belonging

Urban green space: reflections on ecological design

Date and time
18 February 2020
6 – 7.30 pm

Location
Bartlett School of Planning UCL
Room G01 – Central House
14 Upper Woburn Place
London, WC1H 0NN

Urban green space: reflections on ecological design

Speakers
Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge – panel chair), Ingo Kowarik (TU Berlin), Bianca Maria Rinaldi (Politecnico di Torino) and Henriette Steiner (University of Copenhagen)

Registration
Open and free for all, no need to RSVP.


In recent years many European cities have developed innovative park designs that combine environmental objectives such as healthier air, cooler microclimates, and the enhancement of biodiversity with novel approaches to the creation of public space. In this panel event with some of Europe’s leading experts on urban nature we explore some of the latest developments and challenges for enhancing urban nature in contemporary landscape design.

Butterflies, Moths, and Urban Bio-diversity

Date and time
Sunday, 30 June 2019
11:00 – 12:00

Location
Abney Park
215 Stoke Newington High Street
London N16 0LH

Butterflies, Moths, and Urban Bio-diversity

Free, suggested £5 donation welcome
Meet at the main gates,
Stoke Newington High St


Geographer, urban ecologist and Urban Salon member Prof Matthew Gandy will lead a walk through one of London’s most interesting biodiversity hotspots, focusing in particular on butterflies, moths, and other insects.

Revisiting Displacement in Urban Studies

Date and time
Thursday 28 February 2019
17.00 – 20.00

Location
Room CLM.7.02, Clement House, 7th Floor
London School of Economics and Political Science
265 Strand
London WC2R 1DH
View LSE Maps

Revisiting Displacement in Urban Studies

The full programme and registration for the event can be found on Eventbrite:

Full programme & Registration


The Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, in collaboration with the Urban Salon, will be hosting a roundtable discussion on displacement, incorporating Southeast Asia and beyond.

Displacement has been at the core of a number of critical studies that address problems associated with gentrification, infrastructure development, armed conflicts, and so on, which result in socio-spatial restructuring of existing inhabitants. Displacement is not to be confined to last remaining, direct, physical displacement only: it can be further expanded to look at, for example, what Peter Marcuse in Colombia University was trying to say when he refers to chain displacement, displacement pressure or exclusionary displacement. It would also involve what Rowland Atkinson was trying to highlight in his discussion of symbolic displacement, or what Mark Davidson and Loretta Lees were referring to as phenomenological displacement, all of which involve the experience of displacement effect even if you stay put. At the same time, it will be important to understand how displacement itself will be a longitudinal process, begging the questions of when it starts and ends. Displacement may also be thought of in terms of displacement from histories, memories and subjective attachment to one’s affectionate places.

The workshop brings together speakers who will offer reflections on the meaning of ‘displacement’ in their ongoing and past research, helping us to critically revisit what displacement means for urban studies in general.

This event represents the #urbanisation theme, one of SEAC’s three key focus areas.

Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism

Date and time
Wednesday, 30 January 2019
18.00 – 20.00

Location
UCL Pearson Building
Room G07
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
view UCL Maps

Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism

Join the Urban Salon for a discussion of the politics of environmental and technological change.


In his recent MIT Press book, ‘Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism‘, author Jesse Goldstein explores the role that clean technologies, in particular those associated with renewable energy generation, play within mainstream environmentalism, and specifically calls for a Green New Deal. With a focus on strategies that he terms planetary improvement, the unfolding climate crisis is often framed as first and foremost an energy crisis, to be solved by the rapid deployment of renewable energy systems that will help “save the planet” without fundamentally altering prevailing patterns of sociotechnical life and material culture.

Can the innovation and deployment of clean technologies, such as renewable energy systems, adequately address the global climate crisis? Are these approaches to environmentalism limited by entrepreneurial, colonial and extractive logics? Are they necessary and pragmatic short term objectives in the face of an increasingly dire climate forecasts?

Join us for a discussion of ways to make sense of the complicated intersections of environmental, social and technological politics.Jesse will be joined by Professor Andrew Barry (UCL Geography) and Dr Rory Rowan (QMUL Geography).

Why Detroit Matters: Decline, Renewal and Hope in a Divided City

Date and time
Wednesday 9 January 2019
16.00 – 18.00

Location
Graham Wallas Room, 5th Floor, Old Building
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE

Why Detroit Matters: Decline, Renewal and Hope in a Divided City

Chair
Prof Hyun Bang Shin (LSE)

Introduction
Prof Loretta Lees (Leicester)

Speaker
Dr Brian Doucet (University of Waterloo, Canada)

Discussant(s)
Prof Phil Hubbard (KCL)  


Detroit has come to symbolise deindustrialization and the challenges, and opportunities, it presents. As many cities struggle with urban decline, racial and ethnic tensions and the consequences of neoliberal governance and political fragmentation, Detroit’s relevance grows stronger. In this talk, Brian Doucet bridges academic and non-academic responses to this extreme example of a fractured and divided, post-industrial city. He critically assesses the two dominant narratives which have characterised Detroit: that of the city as a metonym for urban failure, and a new narrative of the comeback city. Through including the perspectives of visionary Detroiters who do not normally feature in academic, policy or political debates, Doucet’s work documents many visions of hope which offer genuine alternatives for an inclusive and just city. This talk will discuss the main findings of the edited book Why Detroit Matters, as well as Detroit’s relevance for cities around the world.  

Biography of the Speaker

Brian Doucet is a Canada Research Chair the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo in Canada. His work focuses on gentrification, neighbourhood change and urban inequalities. Originally from Toronto, he lived in the Netherlands between 2004 – 2017 where he taught urban geography at Utrecht University, and urban studies at Erasmus University College.

From postcolonial critique to decolonizing urban studies

Date and time
Thursday 6 December 2018
17.00 – 20.00

Location
UCL Pearson Building
Room G07
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
view UCL Maps

From postcolonial critique to decolonizing urban studies

Speakers
Pushpa ArabindooCatalina OrtizMonika Streule and Lisa Tilley

No booking neccessary


The Urban Salon, a London-wide network exploring international and comparative urban issues, is pleased to welcome you to our next event. We will hear from four urban scholars whose work is embedded in different contexts (India, Columbia, Mexico and Indonesia).

Pushpa Arabindoo, Catalina Ortiz, Monika Streule and Lisa Tilley will bring together insights from scholarship and urban experiences from these contexts to explore the challenges and openings for decolonising urban studies. (How) can the terms of knowledge production in urban studies be transformed, to support the possibility of a decolonised and global urban studies?

Pushpa Arabindoo: Decolonising as an ‘ontological turn’: An ethnographic theorisation from Chennai
Monika Streule: Decolonialism is a practice
Catalina Ortiz: Mestizo Urbanism: decolonial insights for urban studies
Lisa Tilley: Speculative Wastelands and the Contradictions of ‘Use’ in Jakarta
You can read abstracts, biographies and a suggested reading list for those interested in exploring the subject further here (pdf).

We look forward to seeing you at the event – no booking necessary. There will be an opportunity for informal discussion and networking following the panel.

Further links:

Abstracts, biographies and readings (pdf)
UCL Maps – location of Pearson Building