The multidisciplinary research area LUCI – Labour, Urbanscapes and Citizenship of the SUPSI Competence center Labour, Welfare and Social research (CLSW) is organising a workshop entitled ‘At the frontiers of the urban: ecologies, infrastructures, territories in the era of climate crisis’.
The workshop, funded by the European Union and supported financially by Movetia, is a multiplier-event within the Erasmus Innogreen project, in which SUPSI is a partner. 

Description

Cities are responsible for 70% of climate-changing emissions and are one of the planetary nodes around which actions to tackle the climate crisis are concentrated. They are profoundly different from each other: geographical and climatic conditions, social and economic relations, and historical and political processes make them unique (Castan Broto, 2017); on the other hand, global processes linked to cycles of capitalist expansion and the growth of digital platforms place them in a global network that prompts talk of ‘planetary urbanisation’ (Kaika & Swyngedouw, 2014).

From this point of view, some contributions have pointed out the inadequacy of the city as a research space, because since the second half of the 20th century, the key of interpreting the qualitative difference between city and country has become insufficient to interpret urbanisation processes, which should be analysed as planetary phenomena (Lefebvre, 1970). This has led to a critique of ‘methodological citizenship’ (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2015), in favour of a study of urbanisation processes.

Moreover, urbanisation processes now have a planetary dimension, running along cables that cross the most remote areas and oceans and, thanks to satellite connections, extending into extraterrestrial space: the urban, therefore, cannot be confined within walls and ramparts; on the other hand, the city represents a ‘political/administrative fact’, a territory defined geographically and normed administratively (Gandy, 2022) that produces political, social, economic and ecological effects that, in the dense urban fabric, are different from those produced in rural territories.

If urban areas are planetary nodes of the climate crisis, they are also the space in which various contradictions are most pronouncedly intertwined, and in which practices that allude to climate justice can take shape. On the other hand, if the object is urbanisation processes, what are the frontiers of the urban with which to delimit the field of theoretical and empirical study? How do we define the connections and disconnections between urban conglomerates, i.e. interweavings of constructions, relationships and ecologies that, with different dimensions and scales, give rise to metabolisms that are the result of unique historical, economic, cultural, social, geographical and ecological conditions, and therefore cannot be globalised?

This working seminar proposes a moment of collective exploration of these questions, rooted in different research paths, with a view to exploring some potential strands, with the aim of constructing, in the following months, contributions for a Special Issue on these topics.

Information and registration

Participation is for free.

For organisational reasons, online registration is required by 25 September 2024 at www.supsi.ch/go/workshop-clws

The workshop will be mainly a time for discussion, divided into three sessions introduced by short thematic contributions.

The full programme of the event is available in the flyer downloadable on the side.

Bibliography

Angelo, Hillary, e David Wachsmuth. «Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism». International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39, fasc. 1 (gennaio 2015): 16–27.

Castán Broto, Vanesa. «Urban Governance and the Politics of Climate Change». World Development 93 (maggio 2017): 1–15.

Gandy, Matthew. «Urban Political Ecology: A Critical Reconfiguration». Progress in Human Geography 46, fasc. 1 (febbraio 2022): 21–43.

Kaika M., Swyngedouw E., Radical urban politicalecological imaginaries: Planetary urbanization and politicizing nature, Derive, 2014, n. 55, pp. 15-20.

Lefebvre, H. (2003 [1970]) The urban revolution. Translated by R. Bononno, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN and London

Swyngedouw, Erik, e Nikolas C Heynen. «Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale». Antipode 35, fasc. 5 (novembre 2003): 898–918.