All past events

Zoom* and Salle Goguel, 27 rue Saint-Guillaume 75007 Paris Compulsory registration Municipal Housing and Community in Cape Town: Lessons from the Bloemhof Flats In this talk I explore how experiences and memories of a Cape Town municipal housing project sustained people who were forcibly displaced from that project under apartheid in South Africa.  Archival study of the Bloemhof Flats in Cape Town’s District Six, and group interviews with its former residents, inform an exploration of the relationships between municipal housing and community formation, and its impact on people’s lives, both under apartheid and in its wake of material hardships.  Against […]

Zoom* Compulsory registration Presentation of the book ” The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow” We are living in one of the greatest periods of urbanisation in human history, with more cities in the world today than ever before. But is this definitely a positive thing? Are cities actually good for us? And what would the city of the future look like if we tried to make one that definitely was – would anyone want to live there? This book is about the fascinating and sometimes strange world of the people asking these […]

Zoom* & Room K011, 1 Place Saint Thomas, 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 […]