Category: Uncategorised

The Engineer and the Plumber: Mediating Mumbai’s conflicting infrastructural imaginaries

Speaker:

Dr Lisa Björkman (Department of Urban and Public Affairs, University of Louisville)

Discussant:

Professor Andrew Barry (UCL Geography)

Two decades ago, the rules governing the provision of piped municipal water supply in the Indian city of Mumbai underwent a dramatic shift, whereby access to water became linked to the policy frameworks governing eligibility for a property titling scheme – what the paper characterizes as “hypothetical property right”.

The paper outlines the ideological basis and practical implications of the profound policy shift, as well as the material, legal and political contradictions of this new regulatory regime. Focusing empirical attention on a neighborhood in Mumbai’s eastern suburbs, the paper demonstrates how these contradictions are increasingly mediated by the material and practical knowledge, embodied expertise, local authority and wide-ranging sociopolitical relations of an intermediate cast of characters known locally as “plumbers”. The social, political and hydraulic imaginaries animating the work of “plumbing” are shown to inhabit a temporal and spatial imaginary distinctly at odds with a network-flow paradigm within which the work of water supply planning and distribution in Mumbai is conceptualized, materialized and institutionalized. The hydraulic and legal contradictions of these clashing infrastructural idioms – of flow and event – have rendered the hypothetical property-right based water infrastructural regime highly unstable. 

The paper follows these spiraling contradictions, tracing how the instability eventually erupted in Mumbai’s waterscape. With the hypothetical property right based water policy framework delegitimized and effectively unmade, the city’s water infrastructures (their planning and operations) remain caught between dueling infrastructural imaginaries – suspended in a highly politicized state of limbo.

No booking required. See UCL Maps for directions to the location.

Learning from China and Questioning China Exceptionalism: An interdisciplinary debate

The next Urban Salon seminar is going to take place at the LSE as a half-day workshop to provide a space for a unique opportunity to listen to academics working in various disciplines, who are to reflect on their own research and share their thoughts on how studying China has added value to each disciplinary understanding.

Closing date to register: 15th May. Register to attend.

Speaker
Professor Michael Keith, ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford

Professor Fulong Wu, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London

Dr Kean Fan Lim, School of Geography, University of Nottingham

Dr Leigh Jenco, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science

Chair
Hyun Bang Shin, LSE

Exceptionalism and urbanism: China’s cities, the genealogy of markets and thinking about a comparative urbanism

Michael Keith, University of Oxford

In this talk Michael Keith draws on the work from his collaborative book China Constructing Capitalism to consider how we might make sense of what is sometimes described as the exceptionalism of China’s growth model.  He will focus in particular on how we come to think of the historical relationship between law and economics in the genealogy of markets in shaping the crucible of contemporary urbanisms. The suggestion is that this focus opens up alternative ways of thinking about comparative urbanism in contemporary study of the metropolis.

China�s Changing City Planning: Planning for Growth

Fulong Wu, Bartlett School of Planning, Univeristy College London

This paper will review changing city-planning practices in China. The discussion will contrast the effort of developing a new civic center in Shanghai in the era of Republic China, the programs of developing industrial workers’ villages in the socialist period, and the recent planning and development of new towns and eco-cities. The role of city planning in delivery of entrepreneurial urban governance is discussed. At the national and regional levels the instrument of planning is utilized to achieve a more coordinated development. The changing role of city planning is examined, especially with reference to forming the discourse of growth, which legitimizes the state control over urban development. The study helps to explain the puzzle why planning has not diminished along with the demise of the socialist economy. The study also reflects on the notion of neoliberalism and asks to what extent China’s urban development conforms to the paradigm of the neoliberal city.

On the Conceptual Implications of State-driven Infrastructural provision in the Chongqing city-region

Kean Fan Lim, School of Geography, University of Nottingham

This presentation discusses the implications of the state-driven infrastructural overhaul of Chongqing, a major city-region in interior China, for current conceptualizations of “Chinese exceptionalism”. It shows how this overhaul, widely construed to be antithetical to market-driven industrialization at the national level, was in fact an outcome of national spatial strategies that favored selective marketization along the Chinese coastal seaboard. Specifically, the lack of private capitalistic interests in driving infrastructural development in Chongqing impelled the municipal government to undertake the financial risks of infrastructural construction across eight major domains. Subsequent industrialization in the mid-2000s occurred as improved facilities enabled time-space compression, in turn vindicating and perpetuating state involvement in infrastructural provision. This phenomenon offers a double complication of the developmental story in post-Mao China. First, extensive state involvement in inland urban economies like Chongqing is neither a simple residue nor a potential resurgence of Maoist economic governance; it is ironically a reaction to the geographically-targeted, “first wave” marketization pathway of the post-Maoera. Second, state construction and management of infrastructural amenities is not inherently anti-market; on the contrary, it now drives a new wave of market-oriented industrialization across cities in interior China. By extension, the Chongqing case underscores how the economic history of post-Mao China is neither linear nor exceptional to the entire country; it is more accurately framed as a dynamic – and hence inherently capricious – interaction of inherited institutions, selective economic liberalization and state spatial strategies.

Toward the Creative Engagement with Chinese Thought

Leigh Jenco, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science

This presentation will be based on the introduction to my book forthcoming in September from Oxford University Press, titled Changing Referents [??]: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West. The book examines the theoretical possibilities opened by a series of Chinese debates, dating from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in which awareness of Chinese ethnocentrism as well as methods of learning from difference were subject to heightened (some would say unprecedented) scrutiny.  These Chinese thinkers personally confronted the historical processes that supposedly culminated in the displacement of “pre-colonial,” “indigenous,” or “traditional” modes of thought by the terms of supposedly universal Enlightenment modernity.  In contrast to typical readings, I argue that their conversations actually enable more constructive assessments of how and why we might want to learn from foreign others – an important lesson in our own age, when globalization forces us to confront very similar questions and when methodological discussions about engaging “otherness”  themselves remain Eurocentric. In this paper I focus primarily on how Chinese thought can be used “creatively” in this way despite pronouncements of its modern “death” by Joseph Levenson and others.

An anatomy of resistance: the popular committees of the World Cup in Brazil

Christopher Gaffney (University of Zurich)

This talk will explore the formation, composition and political actions of the Comitês Populares da Copa (CPC), Popular Committees of the World Cup, that formed in twelve Brazilian cities in anticipation of the 2014 World Cup. The CPC was the largest network of resistance movements ever assembled for a sports mega-event and contributed to the discourse of resistance and radical street actions that marked the 2013 FIFA Confederations’ Cup. Each of the twelve nuclei was independent of the others but communicated and coordinated through an umbrella organisation called the Articulção Nacional dos Comitês Populares da Copa (ANCoP), National Articulation of Popular Committees for the World Cup.

Discussants:

• Isaac Marrero-Guillam�n (Goldsmiths, University of London), co-editor of The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London�s Olympic State

• Mike Raco (UCL), author of State-led Privatisation and the Demise of the Democratic State: Welfare Reform and Localism in the era of Regulatory Capitalism

Chair:
Hyun Shin (LSE)

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