Author: Louise

Walking as method

The study of walking is located somewhere between literary criticism, with its interest in the sensory realm of the modern subject, and a variety of ground-level interpretations of cultural and material practices. 

In this urban salon event we explore how the simple act of walking can serve as an entry point for diverse perspectives on space, society, and the modern self.

About the Participants

Matthew Gandy is Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Kings College Cambridge. He is a cultural, urban, and environmental geographer with particular interests in landscape, infrastructure, and more recently bio-diversity. His most recent book Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space is winner of a 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize awarded by the Foundation for Landscape Studies and UVA School of Architecture. He has also directed documentary films including the award-winning Natura Urbana: the Brachen of Berlin.

Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies at King’s College London. He has published widely on questions of class, gentrification and the impacts of urban policy on socially marginalised populations. His books include Cities and Sexualities, The Battle for the High Street, and Key Ideas in Geography: City.

Clare Qualmann is an Associate Professor at the University of East London, and an artist/researcher with an interdisciplinary performance based practice. From a background in the visual arts her work engages a range of participatory methods, and a range of media to explore and reveal the overlooked – the politics and potentials of everyday life.

James Vigus is a Senior Lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary. His research focuses the literature and philosophy of the period of European Romanticism, especially the early reception of German thought in Britain, with particular emphasis on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry Crabb Robinson.

Reserve your space here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/walking-as-method-tickets-1037695594457

Borderland: Identity and belonging at the edge of England

Please join us at our next event to mark the launch of Phil Hubbard’s latest book: Borderland: Identity and belonging at the edge of England. 

The event will include reflections on the book from the author and discussions by experts in the fields of cultural and historical geography, urban studies, and social anthropology. 

Book Description

Over recent years, the issues of Brexit, COVID and the ‘migrant crisis’ put Kent in the headlines like never before. Images of asylum seekers on Kent beaches, lorries queued on motorways and the crumbling white cliffs of Dover all spoke to national anxieties, and were used to support ideas that severing ties with the EU was the best – or worst – thing the UK has ever done.

In this coastal driftwork, Phil Hubbard – an exiled man of Kent – considers the past, present and future of this corner of England, alighting on a number of key sites which symbolise the changing relationship between the UK and its continental neighbours. Moving from the geopolitics of the Channel Tunnel to the cultivation of oysters at Whitstable, from Derek Jarman’s feted cottage at Dungeness to the art-fuelled gentrification of Margate, Borderland bridges geography, history, and archaeology, to pose important questions about the way that national identities emerge from contested local landscapes.

“A powerful, poignant and beautifully written journey through the frontier lands of Brexit Britain. This is travel writing with a purpose, charting an anxious and often hostile landscape with care and passion.” Alastair Bonnett, author of The Age of Islands: In Search of New and Disappearing Islands

About the Participants

Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies at King’s College London. He has published widely on questions of class, gentrification and the impacts of urban policy on socially marginalised populations. His books include Cities and Sexualities, The Battle for the High Street, and Key Ideas in Geography: City.

Matthew Gandy is Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Kings College Cambridge. He is a cultural, urban, and environmental geographer with particular interests in landscape, infrastructure, and more recently bio-diversity. His most recent book Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space is winner of a 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize awarded by the Foundation for Landscape Studies and UVA School of Architecture. He has also directed documentary films including the award-winning Natura Urbana: the Brachen of Berlin.

Yasminah Beebeejaun is a Professor of Urban Politics and Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. Her work is concerned with feminist and anti-racist approaches to planning theory and practice. Her articles have been published in many journals including Environment and Planning C, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Planning Theory, Planning Theory and Practice, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She is co-editor of The Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City.

Farhan Samanani is a Lecturer in Social Justice in the School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London. His work explores how people build forms of connection, understanding and common cause across lines of meaningful difference, in the contemporary UK. He works closely and collaboratively with communities on issues ranging from racial justice, to accessible cities, to climate change, seeking to understand and support everyday efforts to build a better future. His most recent book is entitled How To Live With Each Other: An Anthropologist’s Notes on Sharing a Divided World. 

Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space by Matthew Gandy 

Speakers: 

Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge)

Harriet Bulkeley (Durham University)

Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam)

Erik Swyngedouw (University of Manchester)

Discussant:

Phil Hubbard (King’s College, London)

Chair:

Jenny Robinson (University College London)

Register here.

The Urban Salon is delighted to host the launch of Matthew Gandy’s new book, Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (MIT, 2022). Matthew draws together different strands of urban ecology as well as insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought to explore the “other nature” that flourishes in marginal urban spaces, at one remove from the controlled contours of metropolitan nature. This is not the poor relation of rural flora and fauna. As he notes, these islands of biodiversity underline the porosity of the distinction between urban and rural, which he explores through close attention to diverse cultures of nature at a global scale.

Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge) will present his new book which will be followed by a panel discussion and then a Q&A with the audience. 

Matthew Gandy is Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Concrete and Clay and The Fabric of Space, both published by MIT Press.

Roundtable: Comparative Urbanism for Southeast Asia

Panelists

Emma Colven (University of Oklahoma; London School of Economics and Political Science)

Junjia Ye (Nanyang Technological University; ; London School of Economics and Political Science)

Shaun Sheng Kiat Teo (National University of Singapore)

Jeremie Molho (Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies)

Chair

Hyun Bang Shin (London School of Economics and Political Science)

The Urban Salon is delighted to host a roundtable discussion together with the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre (LSE SEAC) at the London School of Economics and Political Science on comparative urbanism in Southeast Asia. This event is also part of the Southeast Asia Forum organised by LSE SEAC.

The renewed and sustained interest of urban theorists in comparative methodologies has generated a wealth of comparative urban research over the past two decades. However, this scholarship remains dominated by research on African and European cities, with Southeast Asia cities not especially well represented. Bringing together scholars whose work engages with sites across Southeast Asia and beyond, this roundtable discussion is convened to reflect on the present state and future of comparative urban research, and the potential of comparative urbanism to enrich understandings of Southeast Asia. Two sets of questions will guide the discussion: (1) What kind of theory-building or testing does comparative research make possible? How do comparative methodologies generate insights into the particular and the general, the local and the global? (2) How do the panelists choose and conceptualize their research sites? Are some sites incommensurable? What kinds of connections or relationalities does comparative research elucidate?

Emma Colven (@EmmaColven) is Assistant Professor of Global Environment at the University of Oklahoma and SEAC visiting Fellow. Her research explores themes of socio-ecological change, environmental expertise, and environmental politics in cities of the global South.

Junjia Ye is is Assistant Professor in Human Geography at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and SEAC visiting Fellow. Her research interests lie at the intersections of cultural diversity, critical cosmopolitanism, class, gender studies and the political-economic development of urban Southeast Asia.

Shaun Sheng Kiat Teo (@ShaunSKTeo) is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. He is interested in the development of comparative tactics for analytical and conceptual innovation in urban studies. Thematically, his work focuses on experimental urban projects and their underpinning state-society relations. His work seeks to contribute to furthering tactical innovation in comparative urbanism and to theorizing the state’s relevance for progressive urban transformation.

Jérémie Molho (@jeremiehmolho) is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.

Hyun Bang Shin (@urbancommune) is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.

Register here.

Images are collages of photographs from Hyun Bang Shin, featuring Bangkok, Hanoi, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur.

Informality and housing precarity: Urban perspectives across North-South

Panelists

Julie-Anne Boudreau (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Francesco Chiodelli (Università degli Studi di Torino)

Alex Vasudevan (University of Oxford)

Discussants

Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge)

Dorothee Brantz (Technische Universität, Berlin)

Chair

Jennifer Robinson (University College London)

The Urban Salon is delighted to host a discussion together with the Center for Metropolitan Studies of the TU Berlin on of informality and housing precarity, on the occasion of the launch of a new book from Hanna Hilbrandt (University of Zurich). Inspired by concepts of informality which have been generated across the global South, the book develops new perspectives on practices of housing governance in Berlin through the twentieth century: normative judgements, room for manoeuvre and ongoing minor acts of negotiation add up to a way to mobilise the concept of informality as “routine enactments of rules and regulations”. The panelists will respond to Hanna’s detailed ethnography of the technically illegal use of allotment garden structures as dwellings in Berlin, both at times of housing crisis and on an ongoing basis.

Hanna Hilbrandt is assistant professor of social and cultural geography at the University of Zurich. Her research explores marginality and exclusion in housing and urban development as well as socio-spatial inequalities in the context of global economic restructuring.

Register here.

A dog’s life: canine geographies of the city

Speakers: Stefano Bloch (University of Arizona), Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam) and Krithika Srinivasan (University of Edinburgh)

Discussant: Matthew Gandy (Cambridge).

A free event open to all.

Register here.

In a time of pandemic, the place of dogs in the city is being discussed as never before as more and more people introduce them into their household as a source of companionship and security: at the same time, dogs appear increasingly central to many rituals of exercise and play central to community-making and neighbourliness.

Reflecting on these issues – and the boundaries drawn between wild and tame animals – Urban Salon (London) and the Urban Futures group, King’s College, present a discussion of the place of dogs in the contemporary city, addressing questions of canine agency, the way this is harnessed as labour, and the forms of violence enacted against dogs as they are divided into categories such as the dangerous stray, the working animal and the domestic pet.

Presentations will be followed by a Q&A.

More on the speakers and their presentations:

Canicide: How dogs fall victim to intrusive police practices

Stefano is a cultural geographer who conducts research on neighborhood change, gentrification, criminality/criminalization, policing, and identity with expertise in LA-based gangs, the history and theorization of graffiti as a socio-spatial practice, and the use of ethnographic and autoethnographic research methods.

Dogs and Danger: More-than-Human Sensing of Urban Insecurity

Rivke’s work connects geography, anthropology and cultural studies, her research focuses primarily on the spatialization and materialization of power, difference and inequality within cities. Her current work studies the role of security dogs in mediating urban inequalities in Jamaica.

The future of conservation with Indian street dogs

Krithika’s interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies, and nature geographies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations and has involved empirical projects on street dogs and public health, biodiversity conservation, animal agriculture, and non-elite environmentalisms.

The post-covid city?

In June 2020 Florida proclaimed – This Is Not the End of Cities – both the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement create opportunities to reshape cities in more equitable ways (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-06-19/cities-will-survive-p…).

In this first Urban Salon since covid hit we consider the post-covid future of cities in London and beyond, critically evaluating Florida’s proclamation by zooming in on 3 themes – urban public space, tourism, and young people.

We have invited four speakers from across the academic and urban professional sector to respond to the Florida proclamations from their research expertise and share with us their thoughts and hopes for the future of cities.

Once you subscribe to the event a zoom link will be sent in advance on the day. Register here.

Chairs

Monica Degen – Brunel University London

Loretta Lees – University of Leicester

Urban green space: reflections on ecological design 

Panel

Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge)

Ingo Kowarik (TU Berlin)

Bianca Maria Rinaldi (Politecnico di Torino)

Henriette Steiner (University of Copenhagen)

Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin

UK premiere of Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin (72 mins), directed by Matthew Gandy, at the London International Documentary Festival (LIDF)

In Natura Urbana the changing vegetation of Berlin serves as a parallel history to war-time destruction, geo-political division, and the newest phase of urban transformation. Natura Urbana takes us on a unique journey through Berlin ranging from the botanical microcosm of cracked paving stones to elaborate attempts to map the entire city in terms of its distinctive ecological zones.

Tickets can be purchased from the LIDF website from 15th: http://www.lidf.co.uk/lidf1415/

Watch the trailer on the film’s website.

Urban Geopolitics book launch: Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities

Urban Salon hosts the book launch of Urban Geopolitics: Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities (Routledge, 2018) edited by Jonathan Rokem and Camillo Boano.

Moving away from loosely defined urban theories and contexts, this book argues it is time to start learning from and compare across different “contested cities”. It questions the long-standing Euro-centric academic knowledge production that is prevalent in urban studies and planning research. Urban Geopolitics: Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities brings together a diverse range of international case studies from Latin America, South and South East Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East to offer an in-depth understanding of the worldwide contested nature of cities in a wide range of local contexts. It suggests an urban ontology that moves beyond the urban “West” and “North” as well as adding a comparative-relational understanding of the contested nature that “Southern” cities are developing.

In this event the editors and some of the chapter authors will present the books overarching themes and engage with selected cities.

Programme:

18.00 Welcome and introduction

Jonathan Rokem (UCL Geography) and Camillo Boano (The Bartlett Development Planning Unit / UCL Urban Laboratory)

18.15 Book chapter presentations

Sadaf Sultan Khan, Kayvan Karimi and Laura Vaughan (UCL)

The tale of ethno-political and spatial claims in a contested city: the Muhajir community in Karachi

Pawda F Tjoa (Cambridge)

The Embodiment of the Ideology of “Development” in the Practice of Marketplace Coordination in Jakarta

Moriel Ram (SOAS)
The Camp vs the Campus: Revisiting the contested landscapes of an urban Mediterranean encampment in Famagusta, Northern Cyprus

Catalina Ortiz and Camillo Boano (UCL)

The Medellín’s Shifting Geopolitics of Informality: The Encircled Garden as a Dispositive of Civil Disenfranchisement?

19.00 Discussants

Matthew Gandy (Cambridge) 
Sara Fregonese (Birmingham)
Sobia Ahmad Kaker (Goldsmiths)

Followed by a Q&A with the audience and a drinks reception.

The event is hosted in collaboration with UCL Urban Laboratory and The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL.

No booking required.