Following a one-year hiatus due to the pandemic, we are proud to announce the return of our yearly StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series with speakers from across Europe and beyond. This year we will focus on struggles over urban property with an amazing line-up of speakers. Join us!
Overall theme of the 2021/22 lecture series
“Who owns the city?” As unequal ownership of urban land, infrastructure, and real estate is a central mechanism in deepening urban inequalities, the question is ever more pertinent. For cities are not only places for people to live in. They have been turned into commodities ready for sale, investment, and value extraction for the few. Such enclosures have deep historical roots but have been aggravated by state retreat, fiscal austerity, and the encroaching influence of finance capital over the past few decades. Be they high-net-worth individuals, higher middle-class families securing asset-based welfare, or financial institutions such as funds, banks, or real estate investment trust, all seek to gain from owning the city. These gains are often stored in shadowy offshore spaces enabling tax evasion reinforcing uneven transfers of wealth between the property-owning class and those left out. While contextual differences are evident, the consequences are generally dire: collective consumption of foundational services in care, transport, education, and the likes is under stress, housing is becoming unaffordable, citizens are displaced or suffer expulsion often unevenly across ethnic and class fault lines, public space is privatized, and value-extraction logics is putting natural ecosystems under pressure as cities expand into their hinterlands. It is becoming increasingly clear that, as a society, “we cannot afford the rich” and, as the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, is showing, we will have to change or model of the economy and society drastically to secure human survival in the long run. Against this canvas, we do find that communities are resisting the above dynamics as they develop strategies to claim their right to land, housing, and essential infrastructure. Communal forms of ownership are key here, but more fundamentally, resistance is also anchored in radically divergent notions of value that offer an ideological counterweight to financialized enclosures. Ultimately, the challenge lies in thinking our societies differently by giving ownership a new meaning: can it be a form of stewardship that secures the benefits of land, infrastructure, and the built environment for the generations to come? This public lecture series explores current struggles over urban property while drawing on empirical and theoretical accounts from cities across the globe.
Speakers in our 2021/22 StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series:
1/10/2021: Tine De Moor (Erasmus University Rotterdam) - Collective urbanism? Challenges and opportunities for commons in cities in past, present and future.
8/10/2021: Brett Christophers (Uppsala University) - Blackstone in the house: Asset managers, rent, and urban housing
19/11/2021: Melanie Lombard (The University of Sheffield) - Beyond displacement: Territorialisation in the port city of Buenaventura, Colombia
10/12/2021: Platforma de Afectadas por la Hipoteca - Mobilizing against Foreclosures and Evictions: The Experience of the PAH in Spain
1/4/2022: Kamna Patel (University College London) - Property as citizenship: challenges to realising an inclusive citizenship
22/4/2022: Rosalba Icaza (Erasmus University Rotterdam) - Social Struggles and Coloniality (of gender)
13/5/2022: Massimo De Angelis (University of East London) - The City as a commons: deep democracy, diffused governance and social reproduction