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 […]

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 […]