All past events

Zoom Compulsory registration Presentation of the upcoming book: Creative Construction: The Rise and Stall of Mass Infrastructure in Latin America Infrastructure is at the heart of contemporary development strategies and critical for vibrant cities.  Yet short time horizons are thought to impede infrastructure provision in democracies.  Why do elected politicians invest in infrastructure projects that will not be completed during their time in office?  The answer depends on understanding what infrastructure is and does in politics.  I argue that the political rewards from infrastructure projects come from the associated contracts.  Like many goods and services, infrastructure investments are neither fully privatized, in the sense of transferring […]

Sciences Po, Room J210, 13 Rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris In-person only Compulsory registration Urban and regional research: Beyond methodological nationalism and colonial legacies The seminar focuses on rethinking how methods and theories tackle the complexities of urban and regional dynamics. By bringing together interdisciplinary scholars, the event examines how contemporary methodologies—from transnational and postcolonial perspectives to critical urban theory—can analyse patterns of inequality, social exclusion, and urban transformation. It will tackle the following questions: How can novel methodological approaches better capture the interplay between local practices and global forces? In what ways do existing theories limit our understanding of urban […]

Zoom* & Sciences Po, 13 rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris Compulsory registration Presentation of the upcoming book “Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis“ Dark Concrete is about how the Black Power movement re-shaped urban politics in the US – from expectations to practices. While the national and international dimensions of the Black Power are often focused on, Kimberley Johnson looks at the movement at the local level, highlighting Newark, East Orange, Oakland, and East Palo Alto and three policy areas: housing, education, and policing. She examines how the Black Power Urbanism movement had its own local meanings as it was defined by […]

Zoom* Compulsory registration Coloniality of Migration & Moving Difference: Brazilians in London & Africans in São Paulo Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, this presentation examines how Brazilian colonial and post-colonial histories and legacies differentially shape the migration experiences of Brazilians in London and Sub-Saharan Africans in São Paulo. It argues that critically interrogating how the constitution of the so-called Global Colonial World continues to influence the experiences of contemporary individuals on the move—or those striving for mobility—can help us challenge homogenising categories of “the migrant,” including categories such as the transnational migrant and the “modern slave.”   By […]

Zoom* Compulsory registration First Nations foundations: cities and the infrastructuring of settler colonisation The infrastructuring of First Nations land into cities is a central project of settler colonisa- tion. In the lands now known as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, settler-colonial myths of ‘uncultivated’ territory justified English invasion and settlement. These myths continue to inform contemporary infrastructure development and discourse which resist First Nations’ sovereignties and self-determination even as the latter unsettles settler-colonial infrastructuring. This chapter offers a predominantly theoretical account of how urban infrastructuring is a constitutive feature of settler colonisation and how settler-colonial urban imaginaries […]

Zoom* Compulsory registration An Amphibious Urbanism What might the urban become if one challenged the proposition that cities are equated with land? How might urban theory be done differently if wetness was brought into centre stage in the politics of habitation? Starting from Guwahati, a city of 1.2 million people in northeast India that constitutes the South within the Global South, this talk furnishes the outlines of an amphibious urbanism: a recalibration of urbanicity by interrogating life (bios) from the wet surrounds (amphi-). Three cuts into the amphibious are presented: 1) plotting, rather than planning, as the idiom of city-making; […]