Events

Zoom* & Salle Goguel, 56 rue des Saints-Pères, 75007 Paris Compulsory registration Topographic Cities: Urbanism, Antiquities, and the Modernization of the Ground in mid-century Lebanon This talk addresses how modernist urban and architectural principles permeated midcentury Lebanon, by looking at the modernization of the idea of the ground in three history-rich cities: Baalbek, Tripoli, and Byblos. While Ottoman Tanzimat reforms had introduced notions of private property, and French cadastral laws had further formalized planning; and while an image of modernity emanated from Mandate-era buildings in Beyrouth, and archaeological legislation reached new momentum across greater Syria in the prewar, it was not […]

Zoom* Compulsory registration Presentation of the book “Bedouin Bureaucrats. Mobility and property in the Ottoman Empire” Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scales. Narrating the lives of Bedouin individuals involved in Ottoman administration, Nora Elizabeth Barakat brings this population to the center of modern state-making, from their involvement in the pilgrimage administration in the eighteenth century and their performance of land registration and taxation as the Ottoman bureaucracy expanded in the nineteenth, to their eventual rejection of Ottoman attempts to reallocate the “empty land” they […]

Zoom* Compulsory registration Migration methodologies How do we come to understand the pervasive politics of discriminatory bordering alongside the improvisational practices of crossing? In this talk I explore why it is helpful to think across near and far compositions of bordering, as much as worldly and highly personal claims to space. I turn to the commonplace realm of street livelihoods in the de-industrialised peripheries of UK cities, to highlight multiple forms of racial displacement that dislocate citizenship status, secure work and affordable space. The everyday reveals these acute aspects of a combined political economy of displacement, as much as the […]

Zoom* and Sciences Po, Salle du Conseil, 13 Rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris Compulsory registration Presentation of the book « Local Officials and the Struggle to Transform Cities. A view from post-apartheid South Africa » Why are even progressive local authorities with the ‘will to improve’ seldom able to change cities? Why does it seem almost impossible to redress spatial inequalities, deliver and maintain basic services, elevate impoverished areas and protect the marginalised communities? Why do municipalities in the Global South refuse to work with prevailing social informalities, and resort instead to interventions that are known to displace and aggravate the very […]

Sciences Po, room B.001, 1 place Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 75007 Paris & Zoom* Compulsory registration Can Social Intermediaries Build the State? Taxation and Informal Governance in Lagos, Nigeria In recent years, many low-income countries have attempted to formalize and extract tax revenue from their large informal economies. Why have these efforts so often failed? In this presentation, LeBas presents her book project with Jessica Gottlieb (University of Houston), which explores how taxes-for-services exchange — the central framework used in tax policy and research — may be complicated by the presence of strong, non-state institutions. Where states are weak, these social […]

Salle du Conseil, 13 rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris & Zoom* Compulsory Registration “Slavery’s City and the Genesis of Urban Informality“ How is the history of slavery linked to urban inequality in the Americas’ largest and most enduring slave society? This talk approaches that question through the visual and relational infrastructures of slavery in nineteenth century Brazil. By suggesting links between slavery’s city and the genesis of urban informality as a primary mode of city-building and governance after abolition, I suggest some of the ways that contemporary socio-racial inequalities can be understood as afterlives of Brazil’s most foundational injustice. Speaker […]

Room K008, 1 place Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, 75007 Paris & Zoom* Compulsory Registration “Public Security, Private Interests: On Social Conflict in Contemporary Brazil” Crime, violence and urban militarisation are themes widely explored in the urban studies literature focused on large Latin American cities. With high homicide and violent crime rates, the region features prominently in discussions of public security, accelerated urbanisation and violence. A series of urban ethnographies has explored how violence is connected to the conduct of everyday life, cultural and social representation, and urban territorial governance, processes of city-making and the reproduction of social inequalities. There is little discussion, […]

Sciences Po, Salle de Conseil, 13 Rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris & Zoom* Compulsory Registration Towards a Science of Cities The recent availability of data about various aspects of cities allows us to envision a science of cities validated by empirical observations. In this talk, I will discuss and illustrate with examples three major points that constitute the pillars of such a program: data (focusing on mobile phone data), modeling (including parsimonious models, simulations, and digital twins), and links with policymakers and planners. Speaker Marc Barthelemy is a former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris (rue d’Ulm). After his thesis on random […]

CEE Key Themes Seminar* Mandatory Registration Sciences Po, 9 rue de la Chaise, 75007 Paris & Zoom A standard approach to understanding drug markets has been the Risks and Prices model (Reuter and Kleiman, 1986) and its dynamic version developed by Caulkins and Reuter (2011). Both versions assume drug markets move to an equilibrium because drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) can fairly be modeled as responding to competitive pressures by adopting available profit-motivated business practices. More recent empirical studies and the emergence of new market forms (e.g., new synthetic drugs, on-line sales, cryptomarkets) have increased the need for models that address when, […]

Online* Compulsory Registration Presentation of the book “Concrete City: Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa” Concrete City: Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa delivers a theoretically informed, ethnographic exploration of the African urban world through the life of concrete. Emblematic of frenetic urban and capitalistic development, this material is pervasive, shaping contemporary urban landscapes and societies and their links to the global world. It stands and circulates at the heart of major financial investments, political forces and environmental debates. At the same time, it epitomises values of modernity and success, redefining social practices, forms of dwelling and living, and popular […]