Author: Louise

Smart Cities and Speculative Urbanisms

Speaker(s)
Nerea Calvillo, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid

Jennifer Gabrys, Goldsmiths, University of London

Nerea Calvillo, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid

Test Bed Urbanism: Data, Machines and Conduits as the Inhabitants of Songdo

The city of Songdo (South Korea) has been promoted as the first smart city built from scratch. By looking at how the implementation of digital technologies has conditioned (or not) its urban design and built environment, this paper tries to identify some properties of this new territory. By defining this city as a test-bed, it is possible to question a broader logic of testing and big data that emerge as new forms of governmentality. What types of knowing and acting are facilitated by way of test-beds, and what makes them specific to our contemporary condition?

Jennifer Gabrys, Goldsmiths, University of London

Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City

A new wave of smart cities projects is underway that proposes and deploys sensor-based ubiquitous computing across infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these digital programs of sustainability give rise to distinct material-political arrangements and practices within cities? And what are the implications of these distributions of governance for urban citizens and ways of life? This presentation will consider the ways in which speculative smart city project proposals might be understood through processes of environmentality, or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies. Revisiting and reworking Foucault’s notion of environmentality not as the production of environmental subjects, but as a spatial-material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies and ways of life, this paper further considers which practices of citizenship emerge through computational sensing and monitoring that are a critical part of the operations and imaginings of smart and sustainable cities.

Transnational Soup: Translating Local Integration Policies Across Borders

Speaker(s)

Hannah Jones, Research Associate, Department of Social Policy and Criminology, The Open University

Ben Gidley, Senior Researcher, Centre on Migration Policy and Society, University of Oxford

 Discussant

Prof Allan Cochrane, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University

This paper explores how European cities develop and innovate in policies for migrant integration, and how these policies might be researched transnationally. It is based on empirical research into the role of local and regional authorities in integration, and the importance of communication and public attitudes. Our research suggests that adoption of promising practices might be most effective when more radically adapted to suit local contexts. The paper reflects on the methodological problems of comparison and how municipalities might learn from each other despite these challenges. We relate this to broader theoretical discussions about the possibilities of comparison in urban studies, and the particular problems of methodological and conceptual nationalism. While not arguing for a return to these reductive approaches, we argue that in policy implementation as well as in theoretical work, it is necessary to recognize the complexities of local and national context when translating practice.

Materialities and urban politics

Speakers
Ignacio Farías (Social Science Research Center Berlin)

Michael Guggenheim (Sociology, Goldsmith’s)

Ignacio Farías: “Cosmograms for city reconstruction: Master plans and the composition of a common world”. 

Abstract: In the aftermath of the Chilean 2010 earthquake/tsunami, most destroyed cities engaged in the elaboration of Master Plans for Urban Reconstruction. In this article, I propose studying these plans as cosmograms, this is, as diagrams of the entities and the relationships among entities articulating a common urban cosmos. By following the work of experts involved in their elaboration, I describe and discuss the establishment of “common boundaries” regarding the territories and entities representing common matters of concern, and the transformation of urban projects into “common things”, ie. projects that give form to this world by means of a surplus of connections to other entities. I also look in detail at how master plans are aimed to act upon the world. Thus, by taking their existence as PowerPoints seriously, I show how master plans operate as resources for action in the present rather than for the structuration of the future.

Michael Guggenheim: Sacralizing and De-Sacralizing Buildings. Noteson the Theory of Technology

Abstract: What does a church do? What do mosques do? Constructivist sociology has usually argued that buildings don’t do anything, but are enacted by users. Conversely, actor-network theory has interpreted buildings as actants that are stabilised by architect-controlled networks. In this article, I attempt a theory, which uses these opposing ideas about the agency of buildings in an ethnographic way, by observing how buildings do different theories in different situations. I use two different kinds of change of use to show that buildings do different things. First, I show that in the case of churches that are changed to other uses, the church attempts to associate the buildings to religion primarily with discursive means.  Second, I show that in the case of factories that are turned into mosques, very small material interventions with furniture I close with some observations of the relationship of buildings and power. 

Urban cultural capital: a research agenda

Speaker

Professor Mike Savage, Department of Sociology, LSE 

Discussant(s)

Dr. HaeRan Shin (UCL Bartlett School of Planning)

Dr Murray Low (LSE Geography and Environment)

Abstract: This paper argues that there is huge, though currently largely unrealised  potential  in analysing the growing significance of urban cultural capital. Although there is now a considerable literature on the re-valorisation of urban centres due to processes of globalisation and economic restructuring (Sassen 2000; etc), we need to understand better how he contemporary city is also being redefined as a fundamental crucible in which forms of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’ are being forged. Only by recognising the accelerating interplay between urban centrality and the generation of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’, can we fully understand the increasing prominence of large metropolitan centres, which stand in increasing tension to their suburban hinterlands. The pivot of my argument will be that whereas Bourdieu’s conception of the Kantian aesthetic which lies at the heart of cultural capital is held to be based on its differentiation from ‘everyday life’, and therefore celebrates an ascetic aesthetic at odds with urban life, the past three decades have seen a remaking of cultural capital in which its ‘wordly’ and ‘engaged’ modes of cultural capital are coming to the fore. I exemplify this argument using data from surveys of cultural taste and engagement, and through reflections on the contemporary role of urban universities and cultural institutions. 

For a general overview on Bourdieu and urban sociology, Mike recommends this chapter of his:

Savage, M. (2011) The Lost Urban Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. In Bridge, G. and Watson, S. (eds.) The New Blackwell Companion to the City. Blackwell, pp.511-520

Creative City Limits: Urban Cultural Economy in a New Era of Austerity

Speakers
Andrew Harris (UCL Urban Laboratory)

Louis Moreno (UCL Urban Laboratory)

Discussant(s)
Roberta Comunian (KCL)

David Madden (LSE) 

Tom Bolton (Centre for Cities)

Creative cities have become a key focus for theorizing and planning urban development over the past twenty years. But the instigation of a new era of fiscal austerity poses significant tests for this agenda of urban creativity. Arguably the creative city notion has flourished within the context of a long credit-fuelled boom in financial services and real estate. What does a period of economic stagnation and retrenchment mean for creative city thinking and policy-making? How can the present situation be used to reassess what the creative city means or could mean? Reflecting on and developing ideas and discussions from a cross-disciplinary research network run last year, Andrew Harris and Louis Moreno will suggest and explore several ways that the creative city might begin to be challenged and reformulated.

Please visit www.creativecitylimits.org for further information on the network and to download a summary pamphlet.

Neoliberal gentrification in Santiago de Chile

Speaker
Dr. Ernesto López-Morales, Urban Planning Department, University of Chile

Discussant(s)
Dr. Alan Mace (LSE Geography and Environment)

Chile holds one of the most neoliberalized housing and land markets in Latin America. López-Morales analyses several politico-economic aspects of the Chilean market of large-scale, high-rise urban renewal and its effects in terms of land economics and gentrification. His presentation specifically observes the ground rent value monopolistically extracted and absorbed by upper-income redevelopers, and the effects experienced by local lower-income owner-occupants in terms of a loss of their ground rent value. Whilst local-level municipalities artificially ‘enlarge’ rent gaps by establishing high Floor Area Ratios (FAR), assuring the monopoly capture of the potential ground rents by the private real estate agents, the remaining ground rent achieved by petty owners-residents and tenants cannot meet the value needed to purchase replacement accommodation, producing a noticeable context of social exclusion. This presentation reflects on the relation between urban neoliberalism, land economics, and gentrification, and presents evidence to support that gentrification can be different to what has been explained by works on/from the West or English speaking world academia, basically differing in scale, the type of displacement produced, and the disparity of the power deployed by the agents involved in the process. 

Leverhulme Public Lecture – The crisis in urban studies: revolution, reform and reconstruction

Speaker

Sue Parnell (African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town and Leverhulme Visiting Professor, UCL)

Discussant(s)

Fulong Wu (Bartlett School of Planning)

Abstract: Working from the position that the crisis in urban studies is well understood and that the logjam is both a product of changing global urban demographics and the distorted nature of academic representations of urban problems, the paper sets a way forward in the construction of an alternative practice of urban theorization based on the interrelated practices of revolution, reform and reconstruction.  In seeking a more inclusive engagement with cities (in the way that authors such as Robinson, Roy and Watson have called for) it is not necessary to reject “Northern” theory outright. But, a quiet revolution that provincialises dominant theoretical narratives such as competitiveness, gentrification or neo-liberalism is imperative. When the empirical reference points for theory formation are shifted and the politics of local urban citizens are taken seriously there will be an inevitable reform of the urban studies cannon. The power of a revisionist process in reorienting the values and focus of urban studies is illustrated here through a discussion of the role modernity in urban Africa that challenges Northern, largely liberal interpretations that reinforce differential values of urban governance regimes for Northern and Southern cities. Finally, the paper suggests that advancing the reformulation of the urban cannon will also be advanced through the simple recognition of exiting largely Southern research that is currently locked in the ghettos of development studies and policy circuits. By illustration I revisit major advances in thinking about gender and the city from the 1980s and 1990s and position the emerging urban welfare debate as critical informants for the reconstruction of urban studies in our time. 

Landscapes of Postmodernity: Changes in the Fabric of Belgrade and Sofia since 1990

Speaker
Sonia Hirt (School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech)

Discussant(s)
Dr Charlotte Lemanski (UCL Geography)

International circulation and social construction of urban policy models: The case of City Improvement Districts in Johannesburg

Speaker
Elisabeth Peyroux (National Centre for Scientific Research, Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Studies (LISST-Cieu), University of Toulouse II)

Discussant(s)
Dr Murray Low, LSE Geography

Abstract: The international circulation of ‘models’ is at the heart of many theoretical and methodological debates raised by the literature on ‘urban policy mobility’. Based on the example of the North American model of Business Improvement District and the case study of Johannesburg, this presentation draws on this literature to investigate the ways in which the BID model is socially constructed through its international circulation and its local embeddedness. Using discourse analysis as a complementary approach it throws light on the ways in which this model is reinterpreted at a local scale, in particular through processes of decontextualisation and recontextualisation, as part of various entrepreneurial strategies. 

Inaugural lecture – Cities in a world of cities: traces of elsewhere in the making of city futures

Professor Jenny Robinson

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ah/ah-events-publication/jennifer-robinson