Beyond incommensurability, methodological regionalism and the Global North/South divide: the challenges of thinking Naples as an ordinary city

Nick Dines (Middlesex University)

For centuries Naples has been been viewed by foreigners, Italians and Neapolitans themselves to be something of an urban exception. Especially since Italian Unification, the city has been persistently diagnosed as a backward and undeveloped metropolis that lacks the accoutrements of urban modernity and civility. The image of an aberrant city has not always been seen in a negative light: Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, for example, identified in Naples a primordial and ‘porous’ urbanism that offered a seductive alternative to the northern European urban life.

The city thus provides a fascinating case for thinking about comparative urbanism and, I would argue, for interrogating assumptions about the ‘place’ of postcoloniality and Eurocentrism in urban-theory debates. My presentation will consider different approaches that have either directly engaged with or might be applied to address Naples’s particularities: from anthropological research on the city and revisionist histories of the Italian Mezzogiorno to Greek geographer Lila Leontidou’s broader proposal for a ‘Southern (European) urban theory’. While these approaches all take issue with orthodox representations of the city, at the same time they tend to reinforce local and regional perspectives that ultimately limit the contribution that this nominally Western city can play in the project of postcolonializing urban studies. I want to suggest that the idea of ‘ordinary city’ offers a possible route out of this impasse: it renders Naples more conducive to intra-city comparison but also alerts us to its own internal ethnocentrisms and conflicts. In order to demonstrate the urgency for such a shift in perspective, the second part of my presentation will trace the global media’s misrepresentation of the city’s recent rubbish crisis as the unrepeatable consequences of organized crime and toxic waste dumping. Insisting upon Naples and its trash as ordinary not only works to repoliticize the breakdown of waste governance and offer lessons for elsewhere, it also raises interesting implications for imagining a cosmopolitan urban theory beyond the Global North-South divide.

Book launch: Urban Revolution Now

To celebrate the new book, Urban Revolution Now: Henri Lefebvre in Urban Research and Architecture (Edited by Łukasz Stanek, Christian Schmid, and Ákos Moravánszky):

A panel debate on the possibilities and challenges of applying Lefebvre’s theory in international urban research and practice.

Lefebvre’s concepts and theoretical reflections have become widely known in the last decades. However, working with these concepts in many different contexts poses serious challenges; and in any case taking Lefebvre as a starting point for research and action is an endeavor and an adventure, an expedition into unknown fields. How can we make use of and move beyond Lefebvre’s insights today? Can we apply his concepts fruitfully in research and action in urban situations across the globe? On the occasion of the book launch of Urban Revolution Now: Henri Lefebvre in Urban Research and Architecture we will have an opportunity to debate these questions with two of the editors, and three London urban scholars.

Speakers

Christian Schmid (ETH Zurich)

Łukasz Stanek (Manchester)

Camillo Boano (UCL)

David Madden (LSE)

Louis Moreno (UCL and Goldsmiths)

Chair

Jenny Robinson (UCL)

Please join us for celebratory drinks from 6.30pm in UCL’s Pearson Building, Room 108 (MacII), and a panel debate from 7pm in the Exhibition Room, G07, Pearson Building.

Re-gentrification and Urban Core Revival of Tokyo: A Survey of Chuo Ward and Condominium Residents

Asato Saito, Professor of Urban Policy, Yokohama National University

Abstract: Since the late 1990s Japanese major cities have witnessed a shift from decline to growth of their population in urban core area. Chuo Ward in Tokyo experienced a particularly dramatic increase in its population. This study tries to examine its impact and implications upon the local communities from two perspectives. Firstly, the analysis of census data reveals that the growth was mainly caused by relatively young adults aged between late 20s to 40s who live in newly built high-rise condominiums and working as urban professionals. This contrast with the previous round of urban development in the late 1980s when many residents were forced to leave the community by the invasion of office spaces. Secondly, a questionnaire survey conducted with the condominium residents shows that their social class is significantly higher than the surrounding area, in terms of the level of income, occupation, and educational attainment. They seem to have a distinguished characteristics in consumption behavior, social and political consciousness, and the formation of human networks. The study discusses if a new round of gentrification is happening in the urban core of Tokyo, and, if so, what is the social and political implications.

Discussant: Antoine Paccoud (LSE)

Book launch: The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination

To celebrate the launch of Matthew Gandy’s new book, join us on the evening of Thursday 29 January for a special launch event in the Wilkins Haldane Room of UCL.

Matthew Gandy is the founder of the Urban Salon, a Professor of Geography at University College London and former director of UCL Urban Laboratory (2005 – 2011). Until the summer of 2015 he will be a Senior Research Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation at the University of the Arts, Berlin. His last publication was the co-edited collection The Acoustic City (Jovis, 2014), launched in London as part of UCL Urban Laboratory’s irregular live music evening Stadtklang. The book will be available to purchase at the launch.

Contact: Jordan Rowe; 

The challenge of comparative urbanism: what is lost in translation when looking at gentrifying neighbourhoods in Rome and Brooklyn, NYC

Sandra Annuziata

Interest in better understanding the phenomenon of gentrification has increased in Italy more recently. However, gentrification needs to be better contextualized in order to fully understand the way in which the process is shaping Italian cities and its socio spatial effects. This talk will explore the transnational journey of ideas and concepts between Italy, Rome, and Brooklyn, New York City, as I move towards my goal of framing gentrification in the Italian context. I argue that what is lost in comparison is crucial in order to see gentrification from a Southern European perspective, one that links it with the privatization of public housing, valorisation and regeneration processes, and ethnicity. One of the most interesting characteristics of the city of Rome is its complex social stratification and the relationships that different social classes have nurtured within urban space.  Space and sociability cannot be separated in many Roman neighbourhoods. Social diversity has been one of the richest resources of the so called popular neighbourhood. 

Focusing on the notion of popular, namely traditionally working class, helps us to mobilize the Gramscian notions of subalternity and hegemony, as well as the desire for a particular type of urbanity, as a property of social relationships based on difference, diversity, and tolerance. Rome’s popular neighbourhoods are rooted in the history of that city and gentrification emerged in Italy as a complementary and necessary evil of modernity, inseparable from heritage and the rehabilitation of historic city centres, later on called regeneration. Gentrification in Rome was/is not very political, as such comparing it with the social preservation and anti-eviction-based communities groups in Brooklyn enabled me to see gentrification in Rome from a critical perspective related to land exploitation and the private property paradigm. Indeed, the popular notion of urbanity is being both evicted and exploited in Rome. Even though popular neighbourhoods in Rome do not exist anymore because of the loss of working class populations, they still exist in circulating ideas and imaginations about a desired urbanity. The ideal of ‘lively working class neighbourhoods’ remains very strong in collective representations in Rome, and although destroyed the ideal has re-emerged in the re-calling of specific forms of urbanity based on sociability and urban solidarity typical of the working classes. This paradox means the (re)production of a partial idea of urbanity, shorn from its context, deprived from its social components (the working classes) and based on the exploitation of otherness.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Sandra Annuziata is working with Professor Loretta Lees (co-organiser of the Urban Salon) at Leicester on a 24 month EU project titled AGAPE – exploring and improving our knowledge of anti-gentrification knowledges and practices in three Southern European cities – Rome, Madrid and Athens. She is also a visitor-critic on Cornell University’s Rome program, where she teaches on European cities. She is the founder of the independent, not for profit research group www.eticity.it.

Sandra was awarded her PhD from the Department of Urban Studies, Faculty of Architecture, Roma Tre University, titledA Neighbourhood Called Desire: Neighbourhood transition in two case studies in Rome and Brooklyn won the Giovanni Ferraro National Award for PhDs in 2010. The key results of her PhD were presented at the International Forum of Urbanism in Delft, Holland, 2009, where she received the Best Paper Award. She has an MA Laurea in Architecture and Urbanism (2004) from University of Venice.

Sustainable London? The Future of a Global City

Discussant(s)

South(Africa)-South(America): Segregation and Housing in São Paulo and Johannesburg

Speakers

Marie Huchzermeyer (Architecture and Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand)

Eduardo Marques (Centre for Metropolitan Studies, University of Sao Paulo)

Comments

Charlotte Lemanski (UCL Geography)

Márcio Valença (University of Natal, Brazil)

The final event of the Urban Salon year, 2-5pm on Monday 23 June, will be a South(Africa)-South(America) encounter, with a Johannesburg-São Paulo comparative exchange between Marie Huchzermeyer (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa) and Eduardo Marques (University of São Paulo, Brazil). Commentators will be Márcio Valença (University of Natal, Brazil) and Charlotte Lemanski (UCL Geography).  The afternoon workshop will explore comparative experiences of segregation and housing policy in both cities. It will also provide an opportunity to engage with wider provocations as to the scope for building understandings of urban processes through such South-South intersections, perhaps side-stepping Northern based theorisations.

An Urban Salon – UCL Urban Lab Workshop

The programme will proceed as follows:

2pm -3.15pm:

The persistence of segregated urban form in South Africa: housing policy, the planning system and rights

Marie Huchzermeyer (Architecture and Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand)

State-assisted housing in post-apartheid South Africa is largely blamed for the perpetuation of segregated urban form. In this presentation, I demonstrate the scale of this housing delivery to destitute households, and locate it within the context of the country’s high level of inequality and poverty, and the extent of reliance on social grants. However, the cause of urban expansion in highly segregated patterns lies also with an unreformed planning system which has not empowered municipalities to direct new developments (whether private or state-subsidised) in accordance with officially adopted visions of compact and less segregated urban form. Given a transformative Constitution which entrenches socio-economic rights, the Constitutional Court has been called upon to rule on inadequacies in housing policy, in the planning system and in the realization of housing-related rights. In this sense, it has contributed towards shaping three emerging normative frameworks – housing policy, planning and rights, but not in a way that reaches far enough to reverse the dominant urban spatial form.

With commentary by Márcio Valença (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil)

3.30pm – 4.45pm:

Poverty, spaces and segregation in São Paulo, XXI century

Eduardo Marques (Centre for Metropolitan Studies, University of Sao Paulo)

The presentation will discuss the changes in poverty, social structure and residential segregation in São Paulo in the 2000s. I begin with the description of the dynamics of poverty, the labor market and income inequality in the metropolitan region, as well as the changes in social structure. Following this, I analyze the spatial distribution of social groups in space, as well as their segregation patterns by class and race. The data show no signs of social polarization and some elements of professionalization, differently from what has been discussed internationally. The metropolis continues to be intensely segregated and structured around a clear pattern of avoidance between social groups. However, although the changes of the 2000s increased the exclusivity of the areas inhabited by elites, they also tended to increase the heterogeneity in the rest of the city, contributing to greater social mix in the intermediate spaces and the peripheries. The last part of the presentation will explore information on personal networks of poor individuals in the city, discussing their possible role in bridging segregated spaces and in integrating territorially isolated individuals.

With commentary by Charlotte Lemanski (UCL Geography).

Final wrap up commentary: 4.45-5pm: tbc

Debating High-rise Urbanism

Panel

Dr. Andrew Harris, UCL Department of Geography

Justin McGuirk, Writer and director of Strelka Press

Dr. Richard Baxter, School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London

Paul Scott, Make Architects

Professor Peter Wynne Rees, Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, and former City Planning Officer, City of London

London and the UK in general are witnessing an increased interest in popular debates around the recent spurt in high-rise buildings. While much of these have been rooted in the architectural discussion around its appropriateness as a design typology to a city like London (and other British cities), the discourse is not new to urban studies either where concerns around the practice of building skyscrapers have been set against the pressures of capitalist urbanisation, with high-rises seen as a symbolically and economically essential ingredient of the �entrepreneurial city�. While these are crucial dimensions of the debate, recently scholars have begun to diversify the dialogue by exploring aspects of everyday practices that explain how this specific urbanity is globalised and localised, ranging from the design and construction process to the more quotidian reality of high-rise living. It is in this context that this event by bringing together academics and practitioners proposes an inter-disciplinary engagement with the larger challenges and opportunities embedded within the production of high-rise urbanism to bring a more nuanced understanding to the debate.

Contact:

Dr. Pushpa Arabindoo; 

Urban comparativism: some reflections and challenges on how to actually do it

Speaker
Sara Gonzalez (Geography, Leeds University)

Discussant(s)
Loretta Lees (Geography, Leicester University)

There is a now an established literature on urban comparativism sparked by the works of Colin McFarlane and Jennifer Robinson. This work suggests that we need to move beyond traditional urban comparative approaches, often conceived within positivists frameworks and geographically limited to the Global North. The comparativist turn argues, however, that comparison should be broadened not to just to include different cities or moments within cities but also as an approach rather than simply as a method. This involves also learning from urban difference and thinking theoretically through urban comparison.

In this session I will present some reflections and challenges of trying to do comparativist research drawing mainly from two ongoing research projects/networks: one looking at the impact of the global financial crisis in 4 European cities and another a research network between Spanish, British and Latin-American universities looking at contestation in cities. The aim of the session is not to provide answers but to spark a discussion where we can think collectively how to best approach urban comparativism drawing from examples that I will present and that the audience will hopefully bring.

All are welcome. 

Imaging Collapse: the Aesthetics of Economic Downfall 

Speaker
Mireille Roddier, Associate Professor, Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, University of Michigan

Discussant(s)
Louis Moreno

Chair
Pushpa Arabindoo (Co-organiser Urban Salon)

Drawing from my proposed book project, Imaging Collapse is interested in expanding the lens through which extreme instances of urban blight and fiscal ill-being are portrayed, and to borrow from interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks in order to make sense of the ramifications of such accounts on contemporary architectural production outside of the claims generated from within the discipline. In particular, I would like to question four interdependent aspects of this production that seem worth probing: its reliance upon, contribution to, and naturalization of post-industrial ruin imagery understood through aesthetic and affect theories; its relationship to the relational aesthetics discourse coming from the art world; its capitalization by cultural institutions and the logics of curation, cultural power and recuperation; and its alleged role in creative class urban gentrification in light of the financing of architecture in an era of economic decline. While the focus of my work is not limited to Detroit, the city serves as a case study for many of its parts. It analyses and reveals the complications in much of the architectural work currently emerging out of socio-economically deprived urban contexts in the service of further production by asking: how do we negotiate the creation of architectural artifacts that are either intended for, or recuperated by, the cultural establishment, in a context marked by social violence on the general public.