Insights from Cities are Back in Town Seminar: Seeing the local in the global and the global in the local

On 9 April 2026, the Cities are Back in Town seminar series hosted its traditional annual Half-Day event at the Urban School on a difficult and crucial topic for urban studies: Seeing the local in the global and the global in the local. The Half-Day brought together researchers from political science, sociology, geography, demographics, urban planning and economics to explore how global processes and local dynamics are mutually constituted -- and what methodological tools urban research can offer to understand this entanglement. Overall, more than 80 lecturers and students took part in the Half-Day.

The seminar started from a deceptively simple question: rather than treating “the global” and “the local” as separate scales, under what conditions, and through which mechanisms, are they co-produced? And which tools can urban studies offer to make this co-production visible? Posing the question this way is not a methodological choice alone. It carries political and institutional implications. Reading urban and territorial realities along these lines requires taking seriously the work of policies, institutions, political choices, and the conflicts that have to be mediated for any of these to hold over time. Without that grounding, urban research risks producing snapshots that explain little and travel poorly. 
With it, research becomes capable of supporting interventions that work on the long run, through progressive and incremental adjustments rather than through grand designs imposed on contexts that resist them. This is where comparative urban studies can earn its claim to actionable knowledge: by clarifying the institutional conditions under which local dynamics and global processes shape each other, and by giving practitioners the analytical leverage to act on them.
 

The event combined two keynote presentations with a roundtable focused on methods and levels of analysis. María José Álvarez Rivadulla (Full Professor at the Universidad de los Andes and a visiting scholar at CRIS, lecturer at the Urban School) opened the afternoon with a presentation on the relational work between activist bureaucrats and civil society leaders that underpinned the development of Bogotá’s Care Blocks System -- a case drawn from over four years of ethnographic fieldwork and embedded in the comparative Change Stories project. Christian Schmid (Professor Emeritus, ETH Zurich) closed with a keynote drawing on his recently co-edited volume Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet, proposing a typology of urbanisation processes derived from a comparative mapping exercise of eight global metropolises.

The roundtable brought together three of the lecturers of the Urban School: Francesca Ferlicca (Sciences Po, CERI), Antoine Guironnet (Sciences Po, CEE), and Ankit Sikarwar (Sciences Po, CRIS). Discussion centred on how participants define and operationalise “the local” and “the global” in their respective research, and how micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis can be connected in practice. Closing remarks were offered by Xavier Timbeau (Sciences Po, OFCE), who insisted on the importance of analysing the “local” in depth and systematically as a precondition for producing actionable research.

Eva Bossuyt, Oskar Steiner, and Tommaso Vitale