Half-day Seminar : Seeing the local in the global and the global in the local

9 April 2026 – 1-7 pm (hybrid)

This half-day seminar explores different perspectives on how urban and regional studies can bridge the gap between global processes and their local manifestations. Rather than treating “the global” and “the local” as separate scales, we approach them as mutually constitutive. The central question is: under what conditions, and through which mechanisms, are the local and the global co-produced? And which tools can urban studies provide us with to understand this?

Two keynote perspectives anchor the discussion. Presenting her book Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization (co-authored with Luca Ruggiero) Maria Kaika tells the story of land financialization through the deep history of a single neighbourhood, showing how local elites, workers, and institutions actively shaped financialization from the bottom up. Christian Schmid, in his co-edited volume with Monica Streule, Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet: Theory Building Through Comparison, approaches urbanization comparatively across cities, using spatial variation to show how global dynamics are translated and reconfigured in different contexts. Taken together, the two books propose different ways to unpack the entanglement of local and global urban processes, bringing temporal and spatial approaches into dialogue.

The roundtable extends this conversation by focusing on methods, concepts, and levels of analysis. It begins by asking how participants define and approach the “local” and the “global” in their research. It then turns to microsociology in practice: how do we move from locally grounded empirical material to interpretation, what challenges arise at the micro level, and when does “the global” enter the analysis? Finally, the discussion addresses theory and levels of abstraction, examining how scholars connect micro, meso, and macro perspectives. The central question is methodological: what does it mean to empirically ground the global in the local, rather than assert it theoretically?