2022
Displacement: time and temporality in Nordic colonial architecture
Time and place: Nov. 21, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
Welcome to this seminar and the Cities & Society seminar series with Professor Tone Huse on colonial architecture, urban planning and temporal displacement in the Arctic.
Lecture abstract:
Colonialism in and by the Nordic nation states is an understudied, yet growing field of research. It interrogates the histories and continued effects of Nordic colonialism, as well as efforts to decolonize the Indigenous lands of Kalaallit Nuunat and Sápmi. In this talk, Huse will focus on the urban planning and development practices of the Danish state in Nuuk during the so-called “assimilation period” spanning from 1953 to 1979. She will discuss how urbanisation became a technology of colonialist policies of assimilation and control, but also how colonial architectures were resisted by Kalaallit women. These movements and counter-movements have entailed spatial displacement and erasures in various forms, but also, and importantly, speak to how time and temporality is scripted by colonial architectures. Asking how architecture represents a form of material politics of time, the talk will concentrate on the notion of “temporal displacement”. This notion, suggested by Huse, speaks to forms of displacement that privilege distinct everyday temporalities, thereby excluding others, and in the context of urbanisation are solidified by the durability of built infrastructures.
Organizer: Department of Sociology and Human Geography, and SoTrans
Fostering Sustainable Urban Futures: Building Equity into Climate Change Planning and Action
Time and place: Oct. 25, 2022 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
Welcome to this breakfast seminar in the Cities & Society seminar series: Fostering Sustainable Urban Futures: Building Equity into Climate Change Planning and Action, with Robin Leichenko, Professor of Geography at Rutgers University.
Lecture abstract:
Climate change raises profound questions about the future of cities. How will cities adapt and build resilience to more frequent and severe extreme weather events? How will they change their infrastructure and energy systems to move toward a zero-carbon future? As researchers, planners, and policy makers grapple with these questions, an emerging, cross-cutting theme is the issue of equity: what will climate adaptation and mitigation mean for less advantaged residents and communities? who will have a voice in climate-related decisions and actions? where are the leverage points for building a resilient and equitable urban future? This emphasis on equity is not only foundational for urban communities and environmental and climate justice movements, but is also becoming a key policy priority at the national, and international levels. This talk will explore opportunities, challenges, and synergies associated with bringing equity into climate change planning and responses in urban areas. The talk will draw from the growing literature on equity in climate change planning as well as the author’s work on equity-based community adaptation in the U.S. Northeast.
Organizer: Department of Sociology and Human Geography, and SoTrans
Towards multispecies urbanism and planning?
Time and place: Oct. 11, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 3, Eilert Sundts hus
Social and ecological crises related to the Covid-19 pandemic and a changing climate have heightened the awareness of the entangled fates of humans and non-humans, from the individual body to the planetary scale. This awareness demands that we examine and question how humans coexist not only with nature but also with other species.
About the lecture
“The urban” present a particularly interesting area of investigation in regards to multispecies interaction, since the City historically by and large has been imagined and conceptualized as the exclusively human domain par excellence. Is it time to question whether it is really reasonable to sustain the misapprehension that urban development is an activity which only affects humans, and that humans should be the sole beneficiaries (and victims) that deserve consideration in the development of urban settlements?
In this Cities & Society seminar Jonathan Metzger and Cecilie Sachs Olsen will discuss how the entangled fates of humans and non-humans might speak in challenging ways to wider concerns about planning, researching, understanding and struggling for better cities. The discussion centre-stages the need to find ways to responsibly confront all the difficult questions concerning how, in a world marked by profound relational complexity, urban practices that aim to enable the flourishing of some entities and futures inevitably demand the neglect, othering or active eradication of other beings, things and/or potential developments.
To tackle these questions, do we demand an abandonment of the traditional idea that urban planning and participation are only concerned with the well-being of humans? And if so, what are the practical implications for urban planning and development? What new trajectories for urban planning and urbanism might these questions open up?
Organizer: Department of Sociology and Human Geography, and SoTrans
Breakthrough Communities: Sustainability and Justice in the Next American Metropolis
Time and place: – , Seminar room 201, Harriet Holters hus
Lecture abstract
One of the core tenets of our work is that those who are most considered "the problem" in urban settings have leadership and knowledge to innovate and provide solutions. Through 12 urban and regional case studies from throughout the United States, we will share the knowledge of working with Frontline Communities who have been successful in their efforts of transforming their neighborhoods and regions. These case studies describe a variety of environmental justice and sustainability strategies, through 10 years of community development work funded in part by the Ford Foundation. Combined, these 12 strategies launched and shaped the Regional Equity movement in the United States, a new urban civil rights movement. The 12 strategies, most all led by communities of color, include Community Benefit Agreements in a large public infrastructure investment, Farms to Schools food agroecology production, vacant properties landbanking initiative, creative re-use of hospital for mixed use housing, use of arts and culture as an urban regenerative strategy, and all 12 using Asset Based Community Development strategies.
Organizer: Department of Sociology and Human Geography, and SoTrans
Seminar om nabolag (in Norwegian)
Time and place: – , Auditorium 3, Eilert Sundts hus
Etter en pause, ønsker vi igjen hjertelig velkommen til et arrangement i seminarserien Cities & Society. Vi har invitert to innledere som er opptatte av nabolagets betydning, men som har jobbet med dette på ulike måter.
- Ingar Brattbakk, forsker ved Arbeidsforskningsinstituttet, OsloMet.
- Ragnhild Augustsen, landskapsarkitekt og ansvarlig for podcasten Våre Steder.
Temaet for seminaret denne gangen vil være nabolag og bomiljø. Hva kjennetegner gode nabolag og et godt bomiljø? I hvilken grad kan et godt nabolag planlegges? Hvor viktig er nabolaget? Dette er spørsmål som opptar arkitekter, planleggere og samfunnsvitere, i tillegg til de som bor i de svært ulike nabolagene i storbyen. Vi setter søkelyset på sammenhengene mellom nabolagets fysiske strukturer og det sosiale miljøet.
Etter innleggene blir det en panelsamtale. Moderator: Per Gunnar Røe, professor ved Institutt for sosiologi og samfunnsgeografi, UiO.
Seminaret er finansiert av UiO:Energy.
Arrangør: Cities and Society og Include
2020
The knowledge politics of urban sustainable energy experiments
Time and place: Mar. 5, 2020 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM, Auditorium 6, Eilert Sundts hus
In this breakfast seminar in the Cities and Societies series, Professor Harald Rohracher from Linköping University will give a presentation based upon material from three Swedish cities which have set up ‘smart city’ experiments and pilot projects.
Experiments, pilot and demonstration projects have increasingly become a strategy in governing an urban low-carbon transition. While most of these experiments claim to include a broad range of social actors, they may differ significantly in practice – the socio-technical configurations and models of low-carbon energy systems they propagate and the kind of knowledge they produce. In this presentation I draw on material from three Swedish cities which have set up ‘smart city’ experiments and pilot projects in different arrangements. Based on these case studies I will ask to which degree these projects actually comply with the discourses of openness, change, and learning they are embedded in, or whether they are caught in a demonstration logic and are mainly expected to create legitimacy for the ecological intentions of established actors in the energy sector and cement their dominant position, to confirm the doability of the envisaged changes and to guarantee further resource flows and political support for certain ideas in favor of others. The presentation will ask to which extent the different constellations of smart city experiments also represent different kinds of knowledge politics and thus for different types of knowledge which is produced, different ways of spreading it, and different types of actors who are able to appropriate the knowledge generated in these publicly supported experiments.
The seminar is financed by UiO:Energy.
Organizer: Cities and Society, and Include
Inclusive Architecture
Time and place: Feb. 27, 2020 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, HumSam-biblioteket, Georg Sverdups hus
How does architecture contribute to the production of truly public spaces in the city today? What types of knowledge are needed, and are today's planning and decision-making processes suited for the design of socially inclusive public spaces in the city? Whose city is it really?
Jens Richter from Estudio Herreros will give the introductory talk to this Cities and Society seminar, followed by a panel discussion with invited architects and urban scholars.
In times of pervasive digitalization, migration and climate crisis, the creation of places to meet the other has become one of the most crucial tasks for architects. A new generation of public spaces and buildings is needed to facilitate inter-generational dialogue between different cultures, genders and environmental concerns. How can architecture be a facilitator and generator of a new culture of openness and inclusion, creating permeable enclaves as real social condensers and putting sustainable solutions into action? Looking at recent projects of their practice, Jens Richter will discuss how Estudio Herreros approaches these contemporary challenges that affect us all and how those concerns impact the architectural practice today.
The lecture by Richter, approx. 45 min., starts at 14:20, after a short introduction. The panel debate starts after the lecture, and we have the time until 16:00. After a short comment from each of the panel members, there will be a discussion, and then the audience may participate.
The panel
- Hanna Dencik Petersson: Director, Oslo Architectural Triennale
- Jonas Norsted: Architect, AtelierOslo
- Jonny Aspen: Professor, Oslo School of Architecture and Design
- Fourth participant to be confirmed
- Moderator: Per Gunnar Røe:Professor, University of Oslo
2019
In a time of climate crisis, is there room for thought and discussion?
Time and place: Nov. 7, 2019 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM, Realfagsbiblioteket
In cooperation with UiO: Energy and the Science Library, we invite you to this Cities & Society seminar, with lunch. The main speaker will be Timothy Kevin Richardson, professor in urban planning at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
Climate change is here, creating an urgent need for adaptation and mitigation. At the same time the process of establishing sustainable cities is time consuming, partly because new policies and strategies should be open to public debate. Is there a conflict between democratic principles and the urgency to reduce carbon footprints?
Programme
- 12:15-13:00 «Legitimacy, urgency, sustainability: room for deliberation?» Timothy Kevin Richardson, Professor, Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
- 13:00-13:15 Comments by Gro Sandkjær Hansen, Researcher, NIBR/OsloMet.
- 13:15-13:30 Comments by Lars Böcker, Postdoc, Department of Sociology and Human Geography UiO.
- 13:30-14:00 Discussion moderated by Per Gunnar Røe, Professor, Department of Sociology and Human Geography UiO.
Organizer: Department of Sociology and Human Geography, Realfagsbiblioteket and UiO:Energy
Planetary Urbanisation: Decentering Perspectives on the Urban
Time and place: Oct. 14, 2019 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Harriet Holters hus, rom 201
Welcome to the next seminar in the series Cities & Society. Christian Schmid from ETH Zürich / Future Cities Laboratory Singapore will present first results of the research project “Territories of Extended Urbanization” that explores and analyses a range of very different case studies across the globe.
The concept of planetary urbanisation has recently become a widely debated topic. It starts from the observation that urbanisation has got a planetary reach in the last decades. The boundaries of the urban have been exploded to encompass vast territories far beyond the limits of even the largest mega-city regions. Novel, extended patterns of urbanisation are crystallising in various environments, in agricultural areas, in the space of seeming wilderness and in the oceans, challenging inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded zone and a dense settlement type. New concepts and terms are urgently required that would help us, both analytically and cartographically, to decipher the differentiated and rapidly mutating landscapes of urbanisation that are today being produced across the planet. This means first of all decentering the focus of analysis and adopting an ex-centric position, one that looks from the periphery and asks where to find “the urban.” This contribution presents first results of the research project “Territories of Extended Urbanization” (ETH Future Cities Laboratory Singapore) that explores and analyses a range of very different case studies across the globe.
The Slow Violence of Displacement on the Gentrification Frontier
Time and place: June 13, 2019 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Aud. 5, Eilert Sundts Hus
Welcome to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series: The Slow Violence of Displacement on the Gentrification Frontier by Phil Hubbard, Professor of Urban Studies, King's College London.
The displacement of communities living in neighbourhoods on the gentrification frontier takes a variety of different forms, complicating the distinctions between voluntary and involuntary moves. While some of those displaced can benefit from improved housing and quality of life, for the most vulnerable – the elderly, ethnic minorities, the unemployed and those with long term physical and mental illness – the outcome of displacement is rarely benign. Moreover, the threat of displacement can, for many in this group and others beside, generate negative emotions and mental states: anxiety, confusion, fear, loss, dread, depression and so on. In this paper I draw on an ongoing study conducted on six council estates in London which have been earmarked for, or are undergoing, redevelopment where we have interviewed residents waiting to be rehoused or removed. Highlighting the psychological and physical consequences of living in this state of abeyance, I argue that the gradual desertification of the neighbourhood, the withdrawal of essential services and a breakdown of meaningful relationships between residents can ultimately wear down individuals and households, leading to an inertia that makes effective resistance to displacement slow, fractured and, at times, seemingly impossible. In making this argument, I stress the need for more studies off displacement that consider it as an ongoing process whose impact can stretch over many years rather than a one-off ‘event’ whose effects are felt even before the moment of ‘unhoming’.
Is This Space Public? How Do You Know?
Time and place: June 3, 2019 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundst hus
We are pleased to invite you to this Cities & Society seminar.
Karen A. Franck, Professor in the College of Architecture and Design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is visiting Cities and Society. She will give a talk titled: Is This Space Public? How Do You Know?
The types of urban public space are increasing in number, extending beyond the traditional ones of park and square. Relatedly, their design features are becoming more diverse. The result of both trends is that the status of a space as “public” has become more ambiguous. Two examples in the U.S. are privately owned public spaces and parklets. This presentation will be an exploration of the ownership, design and management features that define a space, conceptually, as public and will then be a more exploratory examination of what features tend to make their perceived status as public spaces ambiguous, with particular attention to accessibility.
2018
Crowds, clouds and ‘accumulation by datafication’: further adventures in the commodification of everyday urban life
Time and place: Dec. 13, 2018 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundts hus
We are pleased to invite you to the next Cities & Society seminar.
Kurt Iveson, Associate Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Sydney, will present Crowds, clouds and ‘accumulation by datafication’: further adventures in the commodification of everyday urban life.
Lecture Abstract
In technophilic discussions of digital connectivity and the city, apps that help us to navigate and explore our urban environments are presented as working for us – improving our experience of the city by enhancing its enchantments and overcoming its obstacles. In this presentation, I argue that we are also being put to work by our apps. By mediating the relationship between the urban crowd and the digital cloud, these apps turn our commutes, our shopping, our leisure, our exercise, even our activism, into a form of digital labour that is exploited for profit in a process of ‘accumulation by datafication’. They therefore represent a new chapter in the commodification of everyday urban life – one that has significant consequences for our rights to the city and challenges for urban politics.
Panel Discussion
After the talk, there will be a panel discussion, with the following participants:
- Associate Professor Jonny Aspen (Institute of Urbanism and Landscape, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design), https://aho.no/en/aho-staff/jonnya
- PhD candidate Aron Sandell (Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo).
The seminar series is hosted by the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo.
Organizer: Cities and Society
Urban sustainability and the problem of the built environment: reworking Forus Industrial Park
Time and place: Nov. 27, 2018 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
We are pleased to invite you to this Cities & Society seminar.
Håvard Haarstad, Professor of human geography and Director for the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation at the University of Bergen will present "Urban sustainability and the problem of the built environment: reworking Forus Industrial Park"
Abstract
Cities are composed of material artefacts and infrastructures that typically change slowly and incrementally. At the same time, our ideas of what is a good city is has changed rapidly the past decades. In particular, the new planning ideals of sustainable and compact urbanism have become widespread and influential. How do we reconcile these different temporalities of cities – the inertia of materiality with the relatively fast pace of emerging planning ideals? In this presentation, I outline some theoretical perspectives that shed light on these issues (policy mobility, science and technology studies (STS), and assemblage thinking). Then I discuss the case of Forum Industrial Park in Stavanger, focusing on the historical development current attempts to transform this into a compact, ‘post‐fossil’ space. We focus on two phases: the late 1960s, following the discovery of oil, when Forus started developing into the core oil cluster in Norway, drawing on ideals from Houston and Milton Keynes; and the current preoccupation with sustainable mobility and density, drawing on ideals from compact European cities like Copenhagen. The case illustrates how the materialities of the built environment constrains attempts to develop sustainable urbanism. This opens for discussing how we can rethink sustainable urbanism in a way that better takes into account existing materialities?
The talk is based on: Haarstad and Oseland, 2017, Historicizing Urban Sustainability: The Shifting Ideals Behind Forus Industrial Park, Norway. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41(5), pp. 838-854.
The seminar series is hosted by the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo.
Organizer: Cities and Society
Putting financialisation in its financial context: transformations in local government-led urban development in post-financial crisis England
Time and place: Nov. 15, 2018 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundts hus
We are pleased to invite you to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series on Thursday, week 46.
Professor Brett Christophers of the Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, will present "Putting financialisation in its financial context: transformations in local government-led urban development in post-financial crisis England"
Abstract:
Through a consideration of certain high-profile ongoing transformations in the property strategies of English local authorities (municipalities), I argue that we need to put urban financialisation – in this case, state-led variants thereof – in its financial context: it needs to be understood as a response, at least in part, to specific financial conjunctures. After several decades of effective withdrawal, many local authorities have assumed a resurgent role in urban property ownership and development in recent years, and especially since the global financial crisis. This resurgence is apparent, albeit selectively, in regard to both commercial and residential property. On the one hand, local authorities have been rebuilding portfolios of investment (i.e. non-operational) commercial property; on the other hand, they have been building new homes, typically not for social rent, through arms-length housing companies. I suggest that understanding these trends requires appreciation of local authorities’ particular financial circumstances in the ‘post-crisis’ era – their operation at the intersection of devolved austerity, reformed housing finance, and unconventional monetary policy – and of the constraints and opportunities that these circumstances shape.
The seminar series is hosted by the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo.
Organizer: Cities and Society
About Time: Changing mobilities and creative urbanism
Time and place: Sep. 10, 2018 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Undervisningsrom 1, Georg Sverdrups hus
We are pleased to invite you to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series this upcoming Monday.
Professor Monika Buscher (Lancaster University, Dept. Sociology) will present "About Time: Changing mobilities and creative urbanism".
Lecture abstract:
“We act as we do because we can get away with it: future generations do not vote, they have no political or financial power; they cannot challenge our decisions”, a recent UN report states. But opportunistic use of normative disjunctures in time is only part of the story. How is (dis-)alignment between temporal, social, and moral orders done? And how do ‘we’ fail to connect across generations, spaces and times? As anthropogenic climate change and environmental destruction are making their monumental mark in the ‘deep time’ of geological earth history, ruinous collapse of large parts of the biosphere is made to happen in the lived temporal and normative orders of modernity, capitalism, and human time. People are notoriously bad at perceiving the ‘system-ness’ of their actions. However, not only are cities essential for a low carbon transformation, they are also spaces of hope where temporal and normative orders of mobilities enable an emerging sense of crisis and of change. In her talk, she uses praxeological reflections on the temporal organization of transport and traffic to explore the normative, prefigurative, performative momentum of changing mobilities and creative urbanism.
The seminar series is hosted by the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo.
Organizer: Cities and Society
Towards a Global Urban Geopolitics - Bringing Geopolitics into the Mainstream of Comparative Urban Studies
Time and place: May 24, 2018 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Aud. 5, Eilert Sundts hus
We are pleased to invite you to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series: Towards a Global Urban Geopolitics - Bringing Geopolitics into the Mainstream of Comparative Urban Studies by Dr. Jonathan Rokem.
Abstract
Conflict and violence in all their degrees and nuances have become a political and humanitarian concern that is predominantly urban. As a result of these shifts in global and local forces, the political geographies of cities are being reshaped, frequently in unpredictable ways, their populations coming together or becoming polarised with often un-ordinary and underexplored patterns.
In this lecture my objective is twofold: firstly, from a theoretical perspective bringing geopolitics into the mainstream of urban studies to enhance our understanding of cities as contested nexus points of social, spatial and political change; and, secondly to construct a multidisciplinary comparative research agenda to re-frame urban contestation as a dynamic and mobile process. I explore the relational and contrastive value of comparisons across different contested cities, pointing at the significance of learning from non-conventional cases normally excluded from academic debates, moving beyond the so called ‘global urban’ theory producing usual suspects. In so doing, I argue that it is timely to start learning from, and compare across different urban geopolitical contexts offering instead multiple access points, from which to explore the ever-expanding range of conflicts, contestations and cultural formations shaping the future of cities.
As an Urban and Political Geographer my empirical work has been inspired by over a decade of experience researching ethnic minorities and contested cities. Some of my recent empirical research from the EU funded Marie Curie Contested Urbanism project (2015-2017) involved spatial analysis of public transport infrastructures in Jeruaslem and Stockholm, coupled to statistical analysis of their urban geopolitical composition. In the case of Jerusalem, access to public transport is multi-dimensional: as well as providing access to resources, it shapes opportunities for spatial mobility that may either overcome or reinforce urban intergroup ethno-national violence. In Stockholm despite a long-standing political vision of social integration, there is increasing ethnic spatial separation. To conclude, I will discuss opportunities, which counterbalances the on-going fractured urban reality in both cities, where the ordinary and not only the military becomes geopolitical relational sites.
Climate and energy justice: Foregrounding space and place
Time and place: Feb. 26, 2018 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Aud.5, Eilert Sundts hus
We are pleased to invite you to a collaboration event between UiO:Energy and Cities and Socity: Climate and energy justice: Foregrounding space and place by professor Stefan Bouzarovski.
Stefan Bouzarovski (also known as Stefan Buzar), is a Professor of Geography and Director of the Centre for Urban Energy and Resilience at the University of Manchester. His professional activities are situated at the intersection of two broad thematic areas: energy and cities.
In this lecture he will talk about two types of vulnerabilities in the climate and energy domain and how their multiple political, social and economic implications interact across different spaces and places.
Reaching the 1.5 °C target prescribed by the Paris agreement invariably requires significant structural shifts in patterns of energy recovery, transport and demand. Such transformations, inter alia, are expected to exacerbate existing and create new social inequalities within and among countries. At the same time, even a 1.5 °C temperature rise is likely to deepen the associated socio-economic risks faced by susceptible communities. The spatialities of these two types of vulnerabilities – in the climate and energy domain – have rarely been considered jointly to date, and there is limited understanding of the manner in which their multiple political, social and economic implications interact across different spaces and places.
Stefan Bouzarovski aim to create the building blocks for a geographical approach towards climate and energy justice. The lecture highlights the synergies and interactions that arise at this fulcrum, while emphasizing the potential existence of unintended effects and feedback loops. He will use the notion of a thermal landscape to encapsulate the multitude of interventions that can help address the social vulnerabilities and injustices arising at the climate-energy interface.
Welcome!
2017
Don Mitchell: Revolting New York
Time and place: Dec. 7, 2017 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Aud.4, Eilert Sundts hus
We are pleased to invite you to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series: Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Have Shaped a City by Don Mitchell.
About the lecture:
Riots, revolts, uprisings, and revolutions have been a near-constant and a decisive force in shaping New York City’s landscape. From the revolt of the Munsee Indians in the 1640s to Black Lives Matters in the present, political and social tumult has – to a far larger degree than is usually appreciated – determined flows of investment, neighborhood restructurings, and everyday life of the metropolis. Drawing on research begun by Neil Smith and his students in a seminar on the Geography of Revolution and now nearing publication, I will show how one of the determinants of the morphology and meaning of the urban landscape is revolt and riot, uprising and revolution – anarchists exploding bombs, gardeners claiming empty lots and holding them militantly, the inchoate rage of looters, the occupation of buildings, massive marches, violence by police and protesters. There is at play in the making of the landscape, I will contend, a constant dialectic of spatial form and social revolt, and it is important to understand this dialectic if we want to understand the making of cities as well as the possibilities for social justice in them. Or, as the Harlem Renaissance writer Allain Locke suggested, the 1935 Harlem riot – and by extension other moments of upheaval – was “a revealing flash of lightning.” Revolting New York – both the book and my remarks in this talk – tells the story of the city as it has been not only revealed by such lightning flashes, but also and especially how it has been remade by the lightning strikes of revolt. In doing so, I think, it makes palpable just how power is built into the landscape – and why. Through both descriptions of revolt large and small as well as historical-geographical analysis (and lots of images), this talk will not only show the remaking of New York’s landscape, but also why it is vital to understand such remaking within the totality of long-term historical change.
CANCELLED: When Public Spaces are Also Private
Time and place: Nov. 23, 2017 9:15 AM – 10:30 AM, Aud. 6 Eilert Sundts hus
We are pleased to invite you to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series: When Public Spaces are Also Private by Karen Franck from New Jersey Institute of Technology.
This lecture is unfortunately CANCELLED due to sickness.
About the lecture:
Traditional public spaces like streets and squares and most parks are easily seen as public spaces: they are owned by the government and are open to all without the necessity of payment. In the 20th century other kinds of urban spaces, which began to appear in cities and suburbs and then to proliferate, are public in some respects but private it in others. Even the urban spaces that were formerly, clearly public began to take on features that made them, also, private. Hence the term “privatization of public space”. This presentation will examine in a systematic manner the various features that make urban spaces that are accessible to citizens without payment both public and private at the same time, using cases from the US and many from New York City as examples.
Urban planning, gentrification and diversity
Time and place: Oct. 23, 2017 2:15 PM – 4:30 PM, Aud.4, Eilert Sundts hus
Welcome to a session with lectures by Loretta Lees from University of Leichester and Kim Dovey from University of Melbourne, followed by a panel discussion.
Loretta Lees
Title: The state-led gentrification of council estates in London and the fight to stay put
Abstract
Most of inner London is now gentrified and council estates and their tenants are the final gentrification frontier. In this talk I explain how and why council estates are being demolished and gentrified as new, ‘mixed income’ communities. I expose the slow violence of ‘regeneration’ as a visceral process of displacement. I highlight the role of the state (especially local government). But I also outline the fight by residents ‘to stay put’ and in so doing discuss what counts as success in resisting gentrification.
Kim Dovey
Title: Place and Displacement: An Assemblage Approach
Abstract
This presentation will focus on questions of place identity and social displacement from two rather different perspectives. The first is based in studies of urban character and place identity in the more formal cities of the global north, the second in studies of informal settlements of the global south. I will argue for an assemblage approach to questions of gentrification that seeks to understand the city in terms of the alliances and synergies between a range of intersecting generative forces. From this perspective urban design and planning factors can help to understand how some neighbourhoods resist gentrification - density, building height, grain-size, heritage, access networks and functional mix in particular. Informal settlements are particularly vulnerable to displacement but the forces for gentrification can also generate a social mix in the most resilient of slums.
Jennifer Robinson: Debating Global Urbanisms: Beyond the Binaries in Comparative Urban Politics
Time and place: Oct. 10, 2017 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, Aud.3, Eilert Sundts house
We are pleased to invite you to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series: Debating Global Urbanisms: Beyond the Binaries in Comparative Urban Politics by Jennifer Robinson.
There has been a strong engagement with calls to globalise urban studies, with a range of different approaches emerging. This lecture draws on a reformulated comparative methodology, oriented to the specific spatialities of urbanisation, in order to take forward current debates in global urbanism.
Firstly, I take issue with some of the ways in which the fully theoretical contribution of post-colonial interventions has been undermined by contrasting wider processes, theorisations and concepts with supposedly a-theoretical or hybridising particularisms. I will insist that building understandings of the urban from somewhere, starting from any city or any urban process, is an explicitly theoretical manoeuvre which cannot be dismissed (or embraced) as a-conceptual. At the same time, insofar as comparative methodologies rest on the radical revisability of concepts, the status of wider theoretical claims about the urban, or urbanisation processes, is always in question.
I argue that the project of decentring, or provincializing, urban studies and urban theory urgently requires that we move beyond emerging false binaries to cultivate cultures of theoretical debate which are open to diverse contributions to the field within the ambit of scholarly practices.
Secondly, I explore how comparative tactics can provide a basis for instigating new and distinctive analyses of the urban which potentially speak to the challenges of urbanisation globally, even though their reach and ambition in the first instance might be located, modest and revisable. Analytical conversations across a diverse array of urban contexts serve to keep the nature of the urban in question, as well as to produce, revitalise and expand analytical registers.
I will draw on examples here from a collaborative, comparative research project (Johannesburg, London and Shanghai) which seeks to disturb analytical segmentations across wealthier and poor contexts, put new kinds of insights emerging from these contexts into wider circulation and, in the process, destabilise key conventional repertoires of analysis. The shared work of recrafting concepts and producing urban theorizations fit for a global urban world awaits.
Alan Mabin: What Need for Southern Theory of Cities?
Time and place: Sep. 15, 2017 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM, Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundts hus
We are pleased to invite you to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series: What Need for Southern Theory of Cities? by Alan Mabin.
Cities are always incomplete and in transition. Do the same ideas, concepts and understandings help to comprehend what is going on in all cities; are cities completely individual; or are there distinct sets of cities, to which particular ways of thinking apply? As with most questions of theory, the generality of statements about cities inevitably arises. In conducting detailed work along some select comparative axes in São Paulo, Paris and Johannesburg, I confront the possibility of distinction between cities in apparently very different settings. It is through these routes that contemporary intrusions of ‘theory from the south’ into debate become significant for my work. In researching and writing change in three cities on three continents, a single theory of cities, or as Rao (2006) suggests, a universal framing fails to explicate my chosen sites of enquiry. I have confronted what to make of ‘southern theory’ (Connell 2007) in relation to cities in the south as well as the north of the world. Students of urban anthropology, architecture, geography, history, planning, politics and sociology find themselves bathed in the idea that southern cities cannot be understood through western or northern theory, and need something new. I consider the question here: what is ‘theory from the south’ or ‘urban theory beyond the west’ (to cite the titles of works from Comaroff and Comaroff 2011 and Edensor and Jayne 2012)? In the light of debates provoked amongst others by Storper and Scott (2012, 2016), what need can be identified for southern city theory?
Martin Dijst: Pathways to Healthy Urban Living
Time and place: May 29, 2017 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
We are pleased to invite you to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series: Pathways to Healthy Urban Living by professor Martin Dijst.
Perspectives on health are in transition. First, the interpretation of health is moving away from a one-sided focus on disease itself to the ability of people to adopt and to self-manage all their life domains such as the physical and mental health domains as well as the social domain. Second, exposures to physical, social and economic environments over time in understanding morbidity and mortality of people get an increasingly prominent role. Third, the awareness in growing that an inter- and transdisciplinary approach is necessary to develop effective pathways to healthy urban living. Especially in cities in which unhealthy temptations as well as opportunities for healthy lifestyles are concentrated addressing these transitions still remains a massive unmet challenge. Based on experiences at Utrecht University, the lecture will address these issues.
Organized by: Cities and Society network at UiO
Breakfast seminar: Lecture by Chris Gaffney
Time and place: Mar. 16, 2017 9:15 AM – 10:30 AM, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
We are pleased to invite you to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series.
The Extraordinary Rendition of Circulations: grounding dispossession in the mega-event accumulation regime. By Christopher Gaffney.
Sports mega-events are extraordinarily profitable for their monopolistic rights holders. The 2014 FIFA World Cup cycle generated $4.8 billion in revenue for the Zürich-based organization, resulting in $2.6 billion profit. Television companies paid the IOC $4.1 billion to broadcast the 2016 Summer Olympics, and the Rio 2016 Organising Committee brought in at least $1.3 billion in advertising contracts. In the local context, construction firms, transportation interests, tourist agencies, and the security sector all profit during an event cycle, while the public finances the spectacle. The imbalances between public expenditure and private accumulation have never been more starkly evident, yet our understanding of how this functions in the context of the event itself remains under-theorised. Scholars have analysed sport mega-events as processes that both implement and accelerate neo-liberal accumulation regimes. In this context, one of the dominant theoretical frames of neo-liberal accumulation theory has been Harvey ́s (2005) Accumulation by Dispossession. However applicable this theory might be in the context of a macro political economy, it does not describe in fine detail the physicality of dispossession, nor how, where, or to whom dispossession accumulates. In order to theorise more robustly the mega-event as an integral part of a globalizing accumulation regime, I examine one specific way in which we can apply the broader framework of accumulation by dispossession within the embodied and spatialised practices of the event itself. I propose that the Extraordinary Rendition of Circulations is one of the principal mechanisms for accumulation by dispossession in the urban context of sports mega-events. If the provision of infrastructure by government is one of the primary, and most costly, tasks of hosting a mega-event, then it is the extraordinary rendition of that infrastructure that allows the event to occur as programmed. The massive security deployments around events are guarantees that event circulations (flights, buses, fibre optics, cell phones, energy) will function in service of the event itself, resulting in accumulation for rights holders. Those who do not hold rights are not entitled to circulate at will and indeed are prohibited from doing so through a number of specific interventions: extra holidays, road closures, security details, surveillance cameras, preventive arrests, pricing mechanisms, etc. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which the Extraordinary Rendition of Circulation functioned in the context of Brazil ́s mega-event cycle, arguing that it is only through a dialectical examination of flows, circulations, and accumulations that we can more fully understand the political economy of mega-events and their impacts on cities. By focusing on the ways in which urban circulations are extraordinarily rendered (and contested) we gain insight into the instrumentality of infrastructure in the mega-event accumulation regime.
Organizer: Department of Sociology and Human Geography
2016
Very particular or rather universal? Gentrification in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg
Time and place: Nov. 14, 2016 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
ISS welcomes Matthias Bernt, Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space.
Matthias Bernt will examine recent conceptual debates around gentrification. Using London, Berlin and St.Petersburg as cases, he argues that both universalist and particularist accounts fall short of making sense of differences.
In this lecture he calls for new approaches which give the politico-institutional environment a key role in explaining neighbourhood change.
Abstract
Over the last years, an increasing number of scholarly contributions has questioned the usefulness of the concept of gentrification for cases outside of the context in which the term has originally been developed.
The paper builds on this debate and explores the unfolding of gentrification in three contrasting environments. It analyzes the course of urban upgrading in London-Barnsbury, in Prenzlauer Berg in East-Berlin, as well as in the central city of St. Petersburg and argues that while the concept of gentrification provides useful conceptual tools to understand the commodification of urban space in general, its explanatory force is fairly limited with regard to the actual spatial and temporal patterns of urban change.
I conclude that what is widely coined as “gentrification” is in fact an umbrella term for fairly disparate socio-spatial formations which are marked by different policies and state structures and result in different dynamics of regeneration and population change. I claim that this calls for more reflection on the double character of housing as a commodity and as a social right, i.e. the nexus between commodification and decommodification in the housing sector. While rent-gap theories provide indispensable instruments for understanding the first, other and more contextually sensitive approaches are needed for studying the latter.
Organizer: Cities and Society
Rodrigo Firmino: Surveillance, Security and Urban Territories
Time and place: Aug. 22, 2016 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundts hus
Rodrigo Firmino is an Associate Professor in Urban Management at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUCPR) in Curitiba, Brazil, and a CNPq (Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) Research Fellow. "Besides the hype and enthusiasm surrounding the possibilities of an increasing capacity for central control of the urban environment justified by the dream of smart urbanism, the city is also made up of a series of scattered networks of technologies and practices."
About the lecture:
Besides the hype and enthusiasm surrounding the possibilities of an increasing capacity for central control of the urban environment justified by the dream of smart urbanism, the city is also made up of a series of scattered networks of technologies and practices. These form a fluid network of devices and systems that participate in the formation of an intangible territorial layer made of ephemeral appropriations of space with various levels of interconnection, systematization and complexity. I believe there is an informal and unnegotiated form of territorialization—part of what David Lyon and Zygmunt Bauman call “liquid surveillance”—that is fundamentally supported by the possibilities for smarter control over actions in the urban space offered by ever smaller and more invisible technologies. The making of geographical territories in the city is a sociotechnical process that involves an overlapping of different physical, legal, cultural and technological interconnected layers. A constellation of private security companies—and in many cases, individuals—are “in charge” of monitoring spaces that were supposed to be public, free from any kind of private control. In the logic of the territorial layers, this private management of public spaces can be seen as yet another coating in the making of urban territories.
Organizer: Cities and Society, The Department of Sociology and Human Geography
Simin Davoudi - The making of the city-region
Time and place: June 8, 2016 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
Simin Davoudi, Professor of Environmental Policy & Planning at School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, and Associate Director of the Institute for Sustainability at Newcastle University will critically review different methodologies that have been employed to define the city-region before focusing on the prevailing conception of the city-region as a functional economic space and the dominant top-down methodology which is used for defining its boundaries.
Abstract:
The city-region, one of the most powerful and enduring scalar imaginaries, has seen a resurgence in recent time in both academic literatures and policy agendas. This is not only a reincarnation of an analytical concept to help understand the complex socio-spatial relations, but also a manifestation of a new wave of metropolitan governance. In this presentation, I aim to demonstrate how sixty years of analysing and mapping have helped cementing and legitimating a distinct imaginary of the city-region which is a) economically-driven, and b) city-centric. I will critically review different methodologies that have been employed to define the city-region before focusing on the prevailing conception of the city-region as a functional economic space and the dominant top-down methodology which is used for defining its boundaries.
Cities & Society Seminar Series: Martin Zebracki
Time and place: Apr. 14, 2016 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
Martin Zebracki – Reconfiguring the City through Digital Practices: User-Created Contents and Conflicts in Public Art Engagements.
Digital (mobile) technologies pose new challenges to understanding the city and making sense of virtual urban life. Zebracki will present a study on digitally mediated engagement with the urban public, and discuss the conceptual and methodological implications to wider research on the digital urban condition.
Digital (mobile) technologies pose new challenges to understanding the city as well as offer new research methodologies to make sense of virtual urban life. This seminar presents a case study on digitally mediated engagement with urban public art and discusses at both theoretical and empirical levels how the widening of digital tools has deepened both participation and co-production within hybrid, online-offline augmented realities of urban public art practice. This case will especially deconstruct conventional binaries of material/digital, public/private, permanent/temporary, artist/amateur, expert/novice, production/consumption, hardware/software, representation/non-representation, corporeality/sociality and human/non-human. Critiques of flattening e-communications (especially through user-created and self-curated contents over social media) will be juxtaposed with online conflicting dialogues that occasionally have critical outcomes in ‘real life’. This seminar will conclude with conceptual and methodological implications to wider research on the digital urban condition.
Andy Merrifield – Understanding The Urban: Towards a Metaphilosophy
Time and place: Mar. 14, 2016 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM, Auditorium 4, Eilert Sundts hus
As the inaugural speaker of the Cities and Society seminar series, we are excited to present urban scholar Andy Merrifield.
Merrifield is currently a Supernumerary Fellow in Human Geography at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and a leading scholar in the field of critical urban theory. He received his PhD in geography from the University of Oxford in 1993, where he was supervised by David Harvey. Merrifield is the author of many books including The Politics of Encounter (2013), Magical Marxism (2011), Dialectical Urbanism (2002) and Metro Marxism (2002).
In addition, he has written several intellectual biographies on key thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and John Berger; a popular meditation on slow travel (The Wisdom of Donkeys, 2008); as well as numerous articles and essays on urban art and politics. Merrifield refers to himself as magical Marxist, and while his scholarship clearly bears the imprint of Marxist urban theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, Merrifield’s wide interests and library of references makes him a both brave and unique voice within the urban studies discipline. His latest book is called The New Urban Question (2014), and grapples with establishing new coordinates for urban research and politics under the current conditions of planetary urbanization.
Organizer: Cities and Society