The StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series are back with an amazing line-up of speakers from across Europe and beyond! This year we will focus on struggles over urban property while drawing on empirical and theoretical accounts from cities across the globe.
In (post-)conflict contexts, territorial struggles are strongly associated with the displacement of communities, whether rural-urban or intra-urban. Here, we argue for refocusing attention on territorialisation processes as a means of understanding the dynamics and consequences of contestation between vulnerable minority communities and powerful groups. Focusing on the majority Afro-Colombian city of Buenaventura in the Pacific coastal region, which is simultaneously Colombia’s most significant port and one of its most neglected cities, we explore processes of de- and re-territorialisation. Beyond tropes of displacement and resistance, territorialisation offers a conceptual lens for understanding territorial struggles as complex events, in terms of the physical and symbolic effects of de-territorialisation on communities and individuals, and re-territorialisation as plural, disruptive practices of re-existence. This suggests the need to focus on everyday experiences as well as specific time- and space-bound moments of struggle. In this way, focusing on territorialisation permits a deeper understanding of the social production of territory with multiple elements relating to identity, symbolic practices, and time-space dimensions.
Part of the 2021/22 StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series 'Cities for People, not for Profit. From private ownership to communal stewardship'.
Dr Melanie Lombard is a Lecturer in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. Her research agenda involves connecting the built environment (with a particular focus on housing-related issues) to social processes through exploring the everyday activities that construct cities, often neglected by formal theories and practices of planning and urbanism. She is particularly interested in urban informality, and urban land and conflict processes.
She has explored these themes in cities in Mexico, Colombia, and the UK, working with institutional partners including the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico, and the Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. She is involved in current research funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund comparing urbanisation and migration processes in Ethiopia, Uganda and Nigeria.
Before moving to the University of Sheffield in 2016, she taught at the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute/Global Urban Research Centre (2010-2016). Her previous professional experience includes working in the UK social housing sector.
She has published articles in journals including Urban Studies, Progress in Planning, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She is a Trustee of CLASS (Community Led Action and Savings Support), a charity supporting the Manchester-based Community Savers network.