Half-Day Seminar, Seeing the local in the global and the global in the local, 09.04.2026, 1-7pm CET

Sciences Po, Salle de Conseil, 13 Rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris

Hybrid

Seeing the local in the global and the global in the local

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 recent work on care-oriented public policies in Latin American cities, María José Álvarez Rivadulla tells the story of care networks created along those policies, from the bottom up through ethnographic observation, interviews and focus groups. 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?

Programme

Speakers

María José Alvarez-Rivadulla is Full Professor of Sociology at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and is currently a visiting scholar at CRIS and the Urban School at Sciences Po. Her work addresses inequalities, social policies, and cities, with an emphasis on processes and using mixed methods. She is the author of the books Squatters and the Politics of Marginality, on the political history of the informal city in Montevideo, and Costly Opportunities, on social mobility in segregated societies, based on a longitudinal study of high-achieving underprivileged individuals entering elite universities in Colombia. 

Christian Schmid is a geographer and urban researcher. He is Professor emeritus of Sociology at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich. His scientific work focuses on planetary urbanisation, comparative urban analysis, and theories of urbanisation and space. He is a founding member of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA). He authored an encompassing reconstruction of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, published by Verso in 2022. Together with architects Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili, and Pierre de Meuron, he co-authored the book “Switzerland: An Urban Portrait” (2006), a pioneering analysis of extended urbanisation. He is also the co-editor of two recently published books on planetary urbanisation: “Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet: Theory Building through Comparison” (with Monika Streule), which examines urbanisation processes in eight large metropolitan territories; and “Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles” (with Milica Topalović), presenting case studies in diverse territories of extended urbanisation across the globe. Both books are available as open access at Birkhäuser Publisher.

Francesca Ferlicca is an urban scholar working at the intersection of informality, climate risk, and socio-ecological transformation. Her doctoral thesis from the University IUAV of Venice—recognized with the “Best Thesis on Sustainable Urban Development in Latin America and the Caribbean 2021-2022” by CEDEUS (Chile) and REDEUS_LAC—examined integral regularization policies in Buenos Aires’ informal settlements through a relational lens. Her scholarship appears in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) and Equilibri, alongside contributions to volumes by Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan. She has consulted for the Provincial and City Governments of Buenos Aires, CIPPEC, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Her current postdoctoral project, “Nature in the City,” funded by the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation, examines climate adaptation across informal settlements in the Global North and South. It advances two connected lines of inquiry on water-related risks (flooding and water scarcity) and urban informality in Latin America. The first examines community-led climate adaptation in flood-prone informal settlements, foregrounding residents’ collective agency—through everyday maintenance, small-scale infrastructure, and organised claims-making—and arguing that adaptation is a political practice that produces situated expertise and claims to urban belonging. The second investigates how flood risk is actively manufactured through the expansion of informality into high hydrological-risk zones, tracing how informal land markets and speculative pressures reorganise peri-urban ecologies and generate contested risk landscapes. Together, these lines bridge the literatures on urban informality and environmental governance to examine how informal urbanism simultaneously produces and responds to environmental precarity.

Antoine Guironnet is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for European Studies (CEE) as part of the European ReHousIn project. Trained as a political scientist, he holds a PhD in urban and regional planning. As an urban political economist, he studies the financialization of the production of the built environment with a focus on power relationships between state and corporate actors across scales, and their political, economic, and socio-spatial transformations in major metropolitan areas, particularly in France. His most recent articles on housing have been published in Environment & Planning A: Economy & Space, International Journal of Housing Policy, Housing Studies. He has also contributed to the debate on asset management capitalism in the forthcoming Elgar Handbook on Financialization and Space, as well as with the book L’empire urbain de la finance (with Ludovic Halbert, Amsterdam Editions, 2023). He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Métropoles, where he has previously served as co-editor in charge of book reviews (2018-2025).

Ankit Sikarwar is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Research on Social Inequalities (CRIS). His research examines environment-population interactions across multiple scales – from individuals and rural communities to urban centres, sub-national, national, and international contexts. His work addresses critical questions: How can environmental risks and their overlapping effects be effectively measured? Who is most exposed and vulnerable? How can the heterogeneity of impacts below administrative boundaries be captured? He also investigates the structural barriers that hinder equitable solutions, particularly in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), where socio-economic inequalities and environmental risks intersect most acutely. To address these complex research questions, he employs an interdisciplinary approach, combining geography, population studies, and advanced spatial analysis techniques such as remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Xavier Timbeau est directeur principal de l’Observatoire français des conjonctures économiques (O.F.C.E), centre de recherches en économie de Sciences-Po. Il travaille dans le domaine de l’analyse macroéconomique, de la prévision macroéconomique, de la modélisation économique et de l’économétrie appliquée. Outre les questions de conjoncture, d’analyse de la crise et de politique budgétaire dans la crise, ses sujets de recherche ont porté sur l’estimation du chômage d’équilibre et la fiscalité du capital, les questions d’inégalités dans l’éducation supérieur ou le fonctionnement du marché immobilier. Membre du conseil scientifique du Crédoc, du bureau de l’AFSE, du conseil scientifique de la Revue Economique. Il enseigne l’économie à Sciences-po Paris et à Supélec.

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