Pitch your Work
PYW 1 – Northern Exposure: Political disaffection in the UK after Brexit and the film documentary From Where We Stand
Author
Adrian Favell (University College Cork)
Type of work
Documentary
Description
Northern Exposure, based at the University of Leeds, is a large scale study of political disaffection and urban transformation in four northern towns in the North of England, that have been a locus for the electoral change in the UK since Brexit. It portrays in depth four dramatic post-industrial locations, representing former steel, coal, textiles and logistics industries: Middlesbrough, Wakefield, Halifax and Preston. As part of the fieldwork for the project, we involved a recognised documentary film maker, Lucy Kaye, to make an independent film of the research. Her one hour film, From Where We Stand, has been shown at film festivals and universities internationally. The project Northern Exposure effectively operated as a production company for the film.
At RC28, the PI of the project, Adrian Favell, will introduce the film and its role in the wider urban research of the project, together with a compelling twenty minute segment of the film on the North East former steel town of Middlesbrough. This part of the film focuses on asylum, poverty, urban degradation, community, mutual aid and hope, challenging some of the simplistic stylisations associated with the anger and frustration of the so-called “white working class” in “left behind places” in our understanding of Brexit and after.
PYW 2 – Policy Analysis in High Inequalities in Asia: Critical and Pragmatic Perspective
Authors
Noe John Sacramento (University of the Philippines Cebu & Chiang Mai University)
Pobsook Chamchong (Chaing Mai University)
Type of work
Book
Description
This book explores how policy analysis can be conducted meaningfully in Asian contexts marked by persistent inequalities—economic, social, political, and epistemic. Conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic, it reflects on the difficulties of doing policy work when mobility, funding, and participation are restricted. The crisis magnified long-standing structural inequities in the region and prompted the authors to rethink how policy analysis can remain responsive, inclusive, and context-sensitive. While policy work is often seen either as a technical, evidence-based exercise or as an interpretive, participatory process, the book argues that both approaches face unique challenges in unequal settings where access, voice, and credibility are unevenly distributed.
At the heart of the book is the idea of critical policy inquiry—a progressive effort to move beyond positivism while valuing empirical evidence and interpretive insight. This approach emphasizes meaning-making, framing, and deliberation as essential components of sound policy analysis. The authors engage with dominant frameworks developed in Western contexts, recognizing their usefulness but also questioning their relevance and application in Asian societies. They ask: when Western paradigms are employed in developing contexts, are they applied in the same way, and what variations arise under distinct political and social constraints? The book thus situates Asia not merely as a site of application but as a source of theoretical and practical innovation in global policy analysis.
To respond to these questions, the authors propose a context-sensitive analytical framework built around three core ideas. First, they map spaces of deliberation that range from formal to informal, acknowledging that policy debates occur across multiple, overlapping arenas. Second, they explore narratives—the stories and meanings that circulate among policy actors and shape agendas and legitimacy. Third, they highlight inequalities in knowledge and socio-political status, which determine whose perspectives are recognized and whose evidence is dismissed. Together, these components offer a more grounded understanding of how policy analysis operates amid power imbalances and contested meanings.
Several chapters provide illustrative case studies on youth participation to show how inclusion and engagement can transform policy analysis even under inequality. These examples include youth involvement in crisis response, activism, and experimental “policy lab” initiatives, as well as the authors’ own experiences in policy think tanks. Rather than presenting replicable models, these cases reveal the situated, adaptive nature of policymaking in unequal contexts.
The book culminates in the concept of the Critical Pragmatist Policy Laboratory (CPr Policy Lab)—a framework and platform for fostering reflexivity, epistemic diversity, and balance between critique and action. Grounded in critical pragmatism, it demonstrates how contextual sensitivity and pluralism can sustain meaningful analysis despite limitations. Ultimately, the book contends that even in environments defined by inequality and constrained possibility, policy analysis can still widen the horizons of what is politically and socially imaginable. While rooted in Asia, its lessons resonate globally, offering insights for all societies confronting inequality.
PYW 3 – Conflict Mediation and Land Regularization: Legal Pluralism, Informality, and Urban Inequality
Author
Cintia de Freitas Melo (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
Type of work
Book
Description
This book offers a critical and empirically grounded examination of conflict mediation within urban land regularization processes, advancing an interdisciplinary dialogue between urban studies, critical legal theory, and socio-spatial analysis. Scheduled to be published in Portuguese in Brazil in 2026, the book is rooted in the Brazilian urban experience while deliberately engaging with international debates on informality, inequality, and urban governance in the Global South.
Challenging dominant legalistic and technocratic approaches, the book argues that land regularization cannot be understood as a neutral administrative procedure aimed solely at formalizing property rights. Instead, it conceptualizes regularization as a deeply political intervention into territories historically shaped by exclusion, informality, and uneven access to urban land. Informal settlements are treated not as institutional failures, but as spaces produced through capitalist urbanization, speculative land markets, and selective state presence.
Drawing on theories of legal pluralism—particularly the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos—the book demonstrates how multiple normative orders coexist within informal settlements. Community-based rules governing possession, inheritance, rental relations, and property transfers function as effective legal systems, even when they lack formal recognition. These normative arrangements are not external to state law, but partially overlapping with it, creating hybrid legal landscapes that become sites of tension when formal regularization is initiated.
The central theoretical contribution of the book lies in its critique of judicialized and property-centered responses to land conflicts. Court-based solutions often privilege abstract notions of ownership and legality, disregarding lived social relations and producing displacement, insecurity, and institutional violence. In contrast, the book advances conflict mediation as a democratic, participatory, and emancipatory practice capable of managing normative collisions without erasing local histories and social ties. Mediation is theorized not as a neutral or depoliticized technique, but as a situated practice that redistributes voice, recognizes asymmetries of power, and foregrounds residents as political subjects.
Empirically, the book draws on in-depth case studies of informal settlements in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, including long-established occupations located in high-value urban areas. These cases illustrate how conflicts over tenure, family arrangements, informal rental markets, and succession intensify during regularization processes. By examining mediation initiatives developed in collaboration with universities, social movements, public defenders, and community organizations, the book shows how conflict management can mitigate forced displacement, enhance security of tenure, and produce more socially legitimate outcomes.
By bridging urban theory, critical legal geography, and grounded empirical research, this book contributes to RC21 discussions on urban inequality, governance, and the production of space. It positions conflict mediation as a key analytical and practical lens for rethinking land regularization, urban citizenship, and the right to housing in deeply unequal cities.This book examines the role of conflict mediation in urban land regularization processes, offering a critical and practice-oriented contribution to debates on informality, property, and the right to the city in the Global South. To be published in Portuguese in Brazil in 2026, the book engages directly with Brazilian urban experience while speaking to broader international discussions on socio-spatial inequality and urban governance.
Grounded in the Brazilian context,
PYW 4 – Technology and Forced Migration. Ukrainian Migrants in Central and Eastern Europe
Authors
Agnieszka Bielewska (University of Wrocław)
Ewa Ślęzak-Belowska (Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny w Krakowie)
Type of work
Book
Description
The Russian aggression on Ukraine has drastically altered the migration situation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) leading to mass forced migration. The book we would like to present details the experiences of countless forced migrants who arrived to Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary and the governments attempts in managing the forced migration.
Given the pivotal role of information and telecommunication technologies (ICTs) for both migrants and host societies, the book explores the intersection of ICTs and forced migration and uses comprehensive research and robust qualitative methods to demonstrate how these countries are emerging as New Immigration Destinations and handling the influx of Ukrainians. Contributions from economists, sociologists, and political scientists provide a thorough examination of how Ukrainian forced migrants navigate their lives using modern technologies, as well as their impact on these technologies.
It examines both individual and institutional perspectives. The first one shows the role of ICTs in migration decisions making and in migrants’ integration. The latter – the use of ICTs by private and public actors. Among private actors, it analyses especially the role of the mobile operators in the reception and integration of Ukrainian forced migrants and the challenges of the public-private partnerships in essential technological services. In case of public actors, it discusses the role of ICTs in migration management, starting from EU migration governance, through the question how states use these technologies to communicate with and provide services to migrants, particularly Ukrainian forced migrants and ending at the city level. It investigates the function of ICTs in disseminating information and facilitating access to public services as a migration-management tool. It also provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities that digital technologies bring in facilitating and regulating forced migration in this part of Europe.
PYW 5 – People Power in Cities
Authors
Kurt Iveson (University of Sydney)
Type of work
Book
Description
This session will discuss the new book People Power in Cities by Amanda Tattersall and Kurt Iveson (Oxford University Press, 2026). Book co-author Kurt Iveson will present an overview of the book’s arguments and examples, followed by a short commentary and question-and-answer.
Book Synopsis:
In an era plagued by increasing inequality and intensifying climate change, residents of cities are facing crises on multiple fronts. In response, people are coming together to find solutions. But what does it take for them to change their city for good?
People Power in Cities is an analysis of the strategies people are using to fight for social and climate justice and achieve a greater say in how their cities are run. Highlighting the voices of organizers, activists, thinkers, and movements on the ground, Amanda Tattersall and Kurt Iveson reveal complex ecologies of people struggling for rights to home, dignity, and freedom. They draw from examples around the world, such as the ‘be water’ fluidity tactic used by crowds in Hong Kong, micro-utopia squats in Cape Town, and electoral reclamation of institutions in Barcelona. Unpacking the advantages and limitations of each strategy, Tattersall and Iveson argue against seeing any one as a ‘silver bullet’ to the dilemmas faced by urban movements, instead exploring the potential for complementary combinations of strategies that are too often seen in competition. The result is a people power framework that unlocks opportunities for urban movements everywhere seeking to create change. An essential guide for researchers and organizers alike, People Power in Cities makes sense of the dynamic, interconnected, and insurgent urban moment, helping us seize the opportunities for democratic experimentation available in our cities.
PYW 6 – Urban Radar
Authors
Beth Perry (Urban Institute, University of Sheffield)
Type of work
Podcast
Description
Scholarly podcasting has been described as an insurgent practice ‘against academic structures that curb creativity, inhibit personal and collective transformations and promote self-interest over generosity’ (Cook, 2023). In recent decades there has been a strong growth in podcasting as an engagement platform to make scholarship more accessible to audiences beyond the academy, including within urban studies – for instance the City Road Podcast, The Urban Political, or Walking the City With.
In this contribution we will introduce our podcast Urban Radar, which takes an urban lens to contemporary affairs underpinned by a commitment to urban social justice. Launched in 2025, Urban Radar hit the UK social science podcast charts, and was amongst the top 5% of new podcast entrants according to one major streaming platform. It reached listeners in every continent, over 80 countries and 670 cities (47% of listeners are beyond UK). In the last twelve months, we have made 17 episodes, with 40 guests, including leading urban studies theorists and thinkers, early career scholars and PhD students. In this pitch, we reflect on the motivations, process, values and outcomes of making Series 1 and its potential as an ‘epistemic living space’ (Cox et al, 2023) to challenge traditional modes of knowledge production. We highlight four key characteristics of the Urban Radar approach.
First, our starting point disrupts the usual flows of knowledge in which academic expertise is broadcast to an external audience, via a mode of ‘diffusion’ which presumes a transfer of expertise from ‘inside’ the academy to a supposedly less educated ‘outside’. By scanning the news, Urban Radar brings ideas in to the academic community, enabling the excellence and rigour of scholarly expertise to be ‘infused’ with its contemporary relevance. This further requires an epistemic permeability to how we conceptualise the ‘urban’ and the range of disciplines required to understand and analyse its changing importance as a scale for thinking and doing. Second, whilst sometimes led by the big headlines and stories dominating the news, we actively seek to mitigate spatial blindness (Frickel and Kinchy, 2018) by surfacing urban happenings in less usual settings and places. We seek to foster a space for translocal thinking, moving between and across Easts-Wests-Norths and Souths in search of a global urbanism that transcends usual binaries between global and ordinary cities. Third, Urban Radar operates at a meso-temporality, starting in the here and now, but connecting through discussion with guests to long-standing urban studies debates on inequalities, their structural roots and historical precedents, as well as looking for future imaginaries. Finally, more than passive public engagement, our experience reinforces the potential of podcasting as reflection, agenda-setting and as method (Moore and Theweneti, 2025) for both hosts and guests. Previous podcast guests attending RC21 (with fewer than two contributions) will be invited to discuss their experiences with us, following our presentation before Q&A. If selected to pitch our work, we offer to bring portable podcast equipment and include a feature recorded live from RC21 on a future episode of Urban Radar.
PYW 7 – Displaced: A City’s Scar - Mapping a century of socio-spatial displacement in Lagos, Nigeria
Authors
Nura Ali (University of Liverpool)
Deji Akinpelu
Type of work
Documentary
Description
This pitch presents Displaced: A City’s Scar, a 2025 documentary that maps a century of socio-spatial displacement in Lagos, Nigeria, and interrogates the political, economic, and colonial logics that continue to shape urban inequality in one of the world’s fastest-growing megacities. Situated at the intersection of urban political economy, coloniality, and critical urban studies, the documentary aligns closely with RC21’s 2026 theme of inequalities and the city: Old Issues, New Challenges. The documentary shows how “old” issues – colonial planning, segregation, and uneven power relations – have combined with “new” challenges such as redevelopment, financialised real estate markets, and megaproject urbanism to deepen contemporary urban inequality.
The documentary traces the genealogy of displacement from early colonial segregation policies to present-day forced eviction regimes, revealing how the language of urban renewal, environmental upgrading, and climate adaptation continues to mask elite-driven spatial reordering. Through archival research, key informant interviews and testimonies of displaced residents, it documents how the rhetoric of urban renewal, environmental upgrading, and megaproject development have continued to mask state modernists development aspiration and elite-driven socio-spatial reordering. A central case is the 1990 demolition of Maroko, where over 300,000 residents were forcibly removed to enable high-end redevelopment. Rather than treating Maroko as an isolated event, the documentary positions it as emblematic of a persistent governance logic in which environmental risk, and global capital flows are mobilised to justify dispossession. In this way, Displaced shows how inequalities are not accidental outcomes of urban growth, but are actively produced through planning instruments, state violence, and market-led urban restructuring.
The documentary demonstrates how displacement has become normalised governance practice in Lagos, reshaping waterfronts, inner-city neighbourhoods, and informal settlements in ways that entrench socio-spatial inequality. The pitch foregrounds displacement not simply as an outcome of growth, but as a structuring urban process where state power, speculative capital, and planning instruments converge to dispossess marginalised communities. In doing so, Displaced: A City’s Scar argues that Lagos’ experience is not exceptional, but symptomatic of a global urban condition in which colonial inequalities intersect with contemporary socio-economic and environmental pressures, producing enduring forms of injustice in the city.
The pitch speaks directly to RC21 debates on how historical processes continue to shape present inequalities, while also engaging emerging challenges associated with climate change, waterfront redevelopment, and speculative urbanism in the Global South. For RC21, this work offers three contributions. First, it provides an empirically grounded, visual methodology for tracing long-term urban injustice. Second, it advances a decolonial analytical framework that links historical colonial planning to contemporary neoliberal urbanism. Third, it centres displaced communities as epistemic agents, foregrounding lived experiences as a form of urban knowledge.
For the “Pitch Your Work” session, we will screen selected excerpts from the 30minute documentary and discuss its methodological and theoretical contribution as a research output for theorising displacement and socio-spatial (in)justice in cities of the Global South. The section will close with an open discussion with session participants.
PYW 8 – Are They Kissing Us?
Authors
Burcu Korkut (Istanbul Technical University)
Type of work
Movie
Description
This short architectural essay film examines how urban surfaces function as mediums of political representation in everyday life, foregrounding the visual production of power and inequality in the contemporary city. Focusing on the proliferation of candidate posters during the 2024 local elections in Türkiye, the film traces how faces, slogans, and promises temporarily occupy façades, walls, and public infrastructures, merging with the built environment in fleeting yet intense ways.
Rather than approaching architecture as a neutral backdrop, the film treats urban space as an active interface through which political authority is communicated, negotiated, and normalized. Electoral posters do not merely attach themselves to the city; they transform urban surfaces into communicative fields where visibility is unevenly distributed. Certain bodies and narratives become hyper-visible, while everyday urban practices and alternative forms of presence are pushed into the background. In this sense, representation operates as a spatial practice that contributes to the reproduction of political and social hierarchies within the city.
The project draws conceptual inspiration from Sylvia Lavin’s notion of kissing architecture, which describes the intimate and sensorial relationship between architecture and other visual media. Reversing this gesture, the film asks a critical question: Are these representations kissing us? This reversal shifts attention to how political images and architectural surfaces come into contact with urban bodies, shaping perception, affect, and everyday experience. The city emerges as a space where representation does not simply communicate messages but actively addresses, touches, and disciplines its inhabitants.
Methodologically, the film operates as a research-based visual experiment situated at the intersection of architectural analysis, urban studies, and visual sociology. Through close observation of urban surfaces, framing, and movement, it approaches the city as an assemblage of images, materials, and temporal layers. The essay film format enables a reflective mode of inquiry that interrogates not only what is made visible in urban space, but also how regimes of visibility are produced and sustained.
By focusing on the material and visual conditions through which political representation becomes embedded in everyday urban environments, the film offers a situated perspective on how inequalities are experienced, normalized, and reproduced at the scale of the street. It proposes the architectural essay film as a critical method for engaging with the spatial and visual dimensions of power in the city.
PYW 9 – Everyday Life and Urban Studies / Lived Space and Urban Studies
Authors
Sabine Knierbein (Technische Universität Wien)
Type of work
Book
Description
Everyday Life and Urban Studies revisits the ordinary routines that shape urban life during the crises-ridden last century and early new millennium. Vast parts of Henri Lefebvre’s intellectual work on everyday life however remain underappreciated in urban studies. This book seeks to re-integrate Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life into studies of urbanization. Starting in the 1920s, the book realigns historical insights with contemporary urban phenomena to uncover patterns of capitalist urbanization. By showing the relevance of grasping the minutiae of everyday life to understanding cities, the urban and urbanization today; everyday life, space, and philosophy are brought back in tension. This work combines analytical-methodological exploration, pedagogic mission, and theoretical advances to carve out an everyday-theory-based approach to urban studies situated at the interface of the spatial arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. This book examines the transformative potential that lies hidden in everyday life thereby unravelling a way to nurture hope amid unsettled urban conditions.
The book is essential for students, faculty, and researchers in the fields of urban studies, city planning, urban design, human geography, sociology, cultural studies, and political science.
PYW 10 – Unlocking parking challenges: Leveraging Amritsar insights to tackle parking challenges in early million-plus cities
Authors
Sourav Dhar (Council on Energy, Environment and Water, CEEW)
Type of work
Book
Description
Rapid urbanisation across the Global South, adding 2.5 billion city dwellers by 2050, is fundamentally reshaping travel behaviour, land use, and urban space demand. In India, the urban population is projected to nearly double from 461 million in 2018 to 877 million by 2050, with half of the country’s population expected to live in cities by mid-century. This demographic shift is accompanied by a sharp rise in personal vehicle ownership, expected to increase from 294 million to 494 million vehicles over the same period, with two-wheelers dominating the growth. While urban transport is a key economic driver, unchecked growth in private vehicles is intensifying parking stress, particularly in early million-plus cities that are yet to adopt systematic parking management frameworks. This publication examines the mobility–parking nexus through a detailed case study of Amritsar, positioning it as a representative Indian early million-plus city undergoing rapid spatial expansion and motorisation.
Evidence from Amritsar illustrates how parking stress develops well before cities reach a metropolitan scale. In Amritsar, surveyed sites showed 40% consistent on-street parking occupancy, peaking at 50–92% during weekday evenings (6–7 pm), driven by work-related travel. Off-street facilities averaged 50–70% utilisation, with users favouring free kerbside parking options. The study also found that, despite multi-story residential growth, vehicle ownership remains subdued due to the abundance of multi-storied residential growth, vehicle ownership remains subdued due to abundant on-street parking. Currently, Amritsar holds a 14,017 Equivalent Car Space (ECS) surplus, but projections indicate a 6,537 ECS gap by 2030, escalating to a 31,412 ECS deficit by 2050.
Comparative analysis across similar Indian cities reveals decadal ground coverage growth of 20–61%, yet vehicle ownership correlates strongly with economic prosperity: two-wheeler stock per 1,000 population yields r=0.836 (p=0.039) with GDDP per capita (Gross District Domestic Product), while cars show R²=0.934. These patterns underscore a mobility–parking nexus, where unchecked vehicle proliferation outpaces supply, fostering inequalities in access and space. The study recommendations advocate zonal regulations like prioritising Amritsar’s 34 sq km city-centre core for strict parking pricing, generating ₹10–15 crore (equivalent to USD 11,00,000- 16,00,000) annually by 2035 to bolster ULB budgets (equal to 3–5% of total municipal budget).
Equally critical is governance, as parking is an inherently localised challenge that requires context-specific, neighbourhood-level responses. The study therefore recommends a decentralised institutional framework with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for urban local bodies, sectoral agencies, and elected representatives. Importantly, well-designed parking regulations can serve as an entry point for polluter-pays instruments, such as low-emission zones, congestion pricing, etc, by familiarising users with pricing, zoning, and compliance mechanisms. While particularly necessary for India’s early million-plus cities, this governance-led approach is equally relevant across cities of the Global South, where rapid motorisation, constrained urban space, and limited institutional capacity necessitate scalable, locally grounded mobility management solutions.
PYW 11 – The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle
Authors
Alexandrina Vanke (Institute of Sociology of the Federal Centre of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences)
Type of work
Book
Description
Centring on ‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle’ (Manchester University Press, 2024; paperback 2026), this book talk invites a wider international discussion on how ordinary people across different societies experience, negotiate and respond to inequalities in everyday life and urban space.
Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of workers’ lived experiences in Russia’s major cities, Moscow and Yekaterinburg, the talk introduces and develops the concepts of structures of feeling (Raymond Williams) and everyday struggle. These concepts are examined within larger orders of power, at the intersection of neoliberal and neo-authoritarian modes of urban and societal governance.
Rather than treating everyday life as politically marginal, the book foregrounds mundane practices, affects and moral orientations through which inequalities are lived, contested and partially reworked. The book talk opens up comparative and transnational conversations by addressing the following questions:
- How can structures of feeling, understood as affective principles ordering senses, imaginaries and struggles in post-industrial cities, be applied in glocal contexts?
- How do neoliberal and authoritarian forms of governance shape the everyday lives of workers, and how do workers respond to these conditions
- To what extent is the concept of everyday struggle applicable beyond authoritarian settings, including liberal and non-authoritarian societies?
- Are new forms of transnational solidarity among workers and other ordinary people possible in an era marked by wars, conflicts, catastrophes and polycrisis?
The book talk positions everyday struggle as a shared, though unevenly structured, feature of contemporary urban life, opening space for dialogue across regions, political regimes and disciplinary boundaries.
PYW 12 – Radical Municipalism: The Politics of the Common and the Democratization of Public Services
Authors
Iolanda Bianchi (University of Barcelona, Department of Sociology)
Type of work
Book
Description
This presentation introduces the volume Radical Municipalism: The Politics of the Commons and the Democratisation of Public Services, published by Bristol University Press as part of the Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century series. The volume is co-edited by Iolanda Bianchi (Universitat de Barcelona) and Bertie Russell (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and brings together contributions from more than thirty authors.
With the ambition of reconnecting with a line of thought left open by state theorist Nicos Poulantzas on the democratic road to socialism, the book explores how common-based strategies can be applied to the production and governance of local public services, and what these experiences reveal about the capacity of cities to democratise public institutions. Recognising the limits of past socialist experiences, including both traditional social-democratic and Stalinist approaches, the volume reflects on how a different form of socialism can be articulated through a radical transformation of the state, starting from the local scale and extending beyond it, while acknowledging that state transformation is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.
The book is composed of an introduction and two theoretical chapters written by the editors, which provide a shared conceptual and analytical framework for the volume and establish a strong theoretical basis for the analysis that follows. These chapters are followed by a collection of fourteen empirical case studies analysing concrete applications of common-based strategies to local public services. The cases draw on different geographical contexts, mainly across Europe and the Americas. The volume concludes with a set of reflections on three key dimensions considered necessary to advance a radical democratisation of local institutions and beyond: the scalar dimension, the ownership dimension, and the legal dimension.
By bringing together theoretical reflection and empirical analysis, the book contributes to a broader discussion on the role of cities in processes of democratic transformation, while also reflecting on the possibilities and limits of extending these transformations beyond the urban scale.
The book will be presented by one of the co-editors, Iolanda Bianchi, and discussed by one of the contributing authors, before opening the discussion to questions from the audience.
PYW 13 – Uncoding the City: Part One
Authors
Regev Nathansohn (Independent Scholar)
Type of work
Videography
Description
“Uncoding the City” is a research project based on three Multimodal Anthropological Videographies (MAV) that offers two main contributions to social research: (1) Theoretically, it analyzes urban digitalization through a neo-Bourdieusian approach; (2) Methodologically, it provides an innovative approach to analyzing and presenting ethnographic observations by means of multimodal videography.
This research project is based on a multi-sited ethnography in the field of “smart cities,” where digital means are supposedly designed to increase the efficiency and predictability of urban infrastructures, services, and planning. Part one of “Uncoding the City” focuses on how technology companies re-symbolize the urban sphere as a digitally codable sphere. By using Loïc Wacquant’s (2023) neo-Bourdieusian approach to urban studies, as composed of the trialectics of social, symbolic, and physical spaces, this MAV analyzes the storytelling and visual techniques that technology companies use to deepen their presence in the urban field, in order to increase their financial capital, data capital, and symbolic capital.
This videography shows how technology companies re-symbolize urban space as future-oriented and digitally codable through the following chain of speculations: since people have certain needs and since technology is the solution to these needs, the intervention of technology companies in the public sphere becomes unquestionable and inevitable. By juxtaposing marketing materials for smart city products with ethnographic accounts of everyday life in the city, part one of Uncoding the City uncovers and troubles these speculations.
Methodologically, MAV offers an innovative platform for analyzing ethnographic data through experimental editing. Instead of treating different materials separately, presenting them linearly, or highlighting their totality, MAVs juxtapose two or more materials simultaneously on a single screen in creative, original ways that enable dialectical and even trialectical forms of analysis and display.
Works cited:
Wacquant, Loïc. 2023. Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
PYW 14 – Atlas Otherwise
Authors
Nishat Awan (University College London)
Type of work
Book
Description
Atlas Otherwise considers spatial and visual practices of knowing and locating beyond the evidentiary, considering myths, stories and memory. The result of long-term artistic research on borders and migration, it is concerned with an ecology of practices that emerges across borders – from the coastal knowledge of the Indian Ocean where centuries old myths intersect with infrastructural development to the fragmented journeys of migration where the dreams, delusions and deceptions of borders are endured as a rite of passage, and through an appeal to saints and symbols.
A concern with the atlas and its forms of knowing and representation unfolds alongside a concern with how borders are produced. This is because maps and atlases were foundational to the colonial concept of the border. Atlas Otherwise explores contemporary borders in relation to infrastructural development, ecological breakdown, cross border movements of smuggling and the clandestine movement of people. It addresses these subjects through the many ways those caught within the logic of borders cope within these difficult situations. Far from the usual concerns of migration discourse, the book is concerned with the dreams, delusions and deceptions of borders, and how these are endured as a rite of passage and through an appeal to saints, symbols and stories. It asks what forms of life are produced at the border, and what ecologies of practice support migration and movement across borders as anti-colonial acts.
At a time when migration discourse has become increasingly toxic, and a forensic approach that appeals through evidentiary modes has failed to move the discourse, Atlas Otherwise mobilizes other types of knowledge for an affective response to border politics. Rather than couching the migrant as victim, the book considers them as one amongst many producers of knowledge, practices, and narratives that hold the possibilities of living otherwise amongst the hardening of borders. In this sense, Atlas Otherwise is concerned with other representations of borders and movements across them. It consists of a visual and textual account that bridges the gap between the evidentiary and the affective, and maps the exchange between the digital and the analogue, precisely because these are also modes in which contemporary borders and migration discourse functions. While the digital can be a space of surveillance and control at borders, the book approaches the digital through a technofeminist perspective, as a speculative space for thinking through multiple and overlapping narratives.
The book is the result of research carried out between 2014 and 2022 as part of three projects that include two year-long fellowships (Topology and Mapping, University of Sheffield, Faculty Research Fellowship; Migrant Narratives, Independent Social Research Foundation Fellowship) and a five-year European Research Council (ERC) funded project, Topological Atlas: Mapping contemporary borderscapes. All three projects consider the journeys of undocumented migration and the spaces and communities that coalesce around geopolitical borders within the context of increasing inequalities, conflict and the climate crisis.
PYW 15 – White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America: Race, Place, and Space
Authors
Miguel Montalva Barba (University of Massachusetts Boston)
Type of work
Book
Description
White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America: Race, Place, and Space, uncovers how racism quietly operates in supposedly progressive places. Montalva Barba argues that gentrification isn’t just about rising property values or changing demographics—it’s a modern tool of displacement that maintains white power structures. In these ‘liberal’ neighborhoods, a polished, white middle-class ethos shapes development, with white residents setting the standards of belonging, beauty, and ‘improvement’ while erasing the history and presence of communities of color.
Professor Montalva Barba challenges the idea that being progressive shields one from perpetuating racism, revealing how many white residents, while opposing blatant discrimination, participate in exclusion by justifying their choices with ideals like meritocracy, family values, and “safe communities.” Through the concept of “gensociocide,” he brings to light a form of erasure that extends beyond physical displacement, describing the cultural loss that occurs when communities of color are stripped of the chance to form lasting bonds with their surroundings. This displacement doesn’t just push people out of their homes; it severs entire generations from their roots and sense of place. The book delves into how seemingly neutral behaviors—buying up property, using coded language, or citing ‘children’s safety’—contribute to a subtle but powerful form of exclusion and extraction, while investing in white only futures. In Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, white residents often frame their actions as necessary for building a safe, prosperous community for their kids, masking the reality that these “investments” further entrench racial boundaries.
By unpacking these justifications, Montalva Barba reveals how the future these residents envision is one centered on white stability and control. He also highlights how communities of color are reduced to consumable “cultural experiences” — the diversity of the neighborhood becomes a menu of ethnic cuisines rather than a call for true engagement. His work paints a powerful portrait of how modern gentrification echoes colonial displacement, reinforcing invisible borders that keep true diversity at bay.
PYW 16 – Tanaset Water
Authors
Bouchta Ezziani (Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdi Allah University)
Type of work
Documentary
Description
In the Moroccan oasis of Figig, situated in the midst of the arid desert, the documentary ”Tanaset water” delves into the historical customary system of water distribution, known as ‘tanaset’, through the narratives of the local inhabitants. It is evident that this endangered practice is not merely an irrigation technique, but rather the foundation of social and symbolic existence.
The oasis can be regarded as a verdant island, demonstrating resilience in the face of climate change and human exploitation. In its journey, the documentary explores an integrated social, cultural and environmental system built on a drop of water.
The film transcends the conventional pursuit of resources and instead explores a philosophy of survival. The oasis’ water is revealed to function not only as a resource, but also as a social and moral regulator. Tanas is an oral tradition that is managed by customary committees. These committees are responsible for determining irrigation quotas, timing and duration using the traditional distributor, the Asraifi, and ancient measuring tools such as the tanisa and the kharouba. This ensures justice, solidarity and the preservation of social cohesion against the harshness of the environment.
The film also explores the sacred dimension of water, in which eyes are associated with popular rituals such as ‘Taghanja’, a rain-making ritual, and blessings such as women bathing in the “Ikoudes”, the water distribution centre reserved for men, once in their lifetime when they are brides, reflecting the collective view of water as a divine gift that must be preserved.
Despite the apparent exclusion of women from the official Tanaset councils, the film reveals that women are the actual managers and guardians of water. They act as the unseen entity that facilitates the transformation of the harvest under Tanaset’s protection into sustenance for domestic consumption on a daily basis. It is evident that water has a dual function; it serves as a means for personal hygiene in communal washrooms, while also playing a pivotal role in cultural activities. In the context of mounting challenges posed by drought and the repercussions of modernity on customary systems, women donning white haik have been observed participating in demonstrations
PYW 17 – The Myth of Affordable Housing
Authors
Quintin Bradley (Leeds Beckett University)
Type of work
Book
Description
Affordable housing makes housing unaffordable
The Myth of Affordable Housing is a critique of the abject failure of affordable housing policies to address a global crisis of need. Affordability in housing has proved an excuse for unleashing financial speculation in real estate, channelling subsidies to profit landlords, developers, capital markets, and landowners. It is a regressive strategy to maintain demand without reducing price.
The Myth of Affordable Housing is an evaluation of affordability as a policy goal, and it investigates the political economy of housing from a Marxist perspective. The displacement of need by affordability has made market price the standard against which all goals are valued. It is this act of valuation that guides the book’s critique of affordability, and it is the value form of affordable housing, its production, circulation and exchange, that provides its trajectory. Just like any other commodity, so-called affordable housing creates value and surplus value in production to realise value as money in exchange.The Myth of Affordable Housing demonstrates the failure of price to effectively fulfil socially needed goals, and it maps out a revolutionary new strategy to bring decent housing for all.
PYW 19 – Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center
Authors
Max Holleran (University of Melbourne)
Samuel Holleran (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
Type of work
Book
Description
This book, forthcoming with Three Hills an imprint of Cornell University Press, charts the course of ‘survivor steel’ from the ruins of the World Trade Center to over 2000 memorials across the world. Of the 200,000 tons of steel recovered, 95% was quickly recycled, but what remained was sacralized, and distributed, to form local memorials primarily in the US but also in Italy, Israel, New Zealand, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Unlike WWI cenotaphs, located in town centers, or large monuments in capitals, 9/11 steel ended up in small memorials in office parks and traffic circles—the edge spaces of 21st century suburban sprawl.
Using newspaper reports, interviews, and materials obtained from a freedom of information request, the book analyzes how dispersed memorialization honored ‘first responders’ across the U.S., enlarging the geography of trauma from Lower Manhattan to the nation; and how memorials made by local craftspeople brought back themes of spoliation, entropy, and fear from postwar sculpture. We connect the curation, gifting, and transportation of steel to a form of mourning with military antecedents as well as a deliberate focus on strength and martial masculinity in the decade immediately after the 9/11 attacks. This was particularly important to tie the events of 9/11 to the War on Terror which was losing popularity during the 2010s when 9/11 steel artifacts were distributed. Finally, this book focuses on the civic importance of ‘laying hands’ on survivor steel, showing that even in our digital age the demands of memory remain stubbornly tactile. The book engages with memorialization literature to consider the future of public sculptures and their political meanings.
PYW 20 – Raise the Roof: Building Tenant Power in Syracuse
Authors
Gretchen Purser (Syracuse University, writer and director)
Franklin Thompson (producer and director of photography)
Type of work
Documentary
Description
Raise the Roof takes viewers inside the growing movement for housing justice through the lens of tenant organizing in Syracuse, New York—one of the poorest cities in the U.S. and home to a deep, ongoing housing crisis. With rents rising and buildings crumbling, tenants are coming together to demand better. This award-winning documentary gives a close-up view of what that organizing looks like: from tense meetings and strategy sessions to the day-to-day realities of living under negligent landlords. It offers a rare look at how tenant unions operate, how they build collective power, and what it means to stand up when the system fails. Raise the Roof is a compelling portrait of grassroots action and the people reshaping the fight for fair housing.
PYW 21 – Handbook on International Migration in Small Towns and Rural Areas
Authors
Eduardo Barberis (University of Urbino Carlo Bo)
Ruth McAreavey (Newcastle University)
Type of work
Book
Description
This Handbook provides a critical and comprehensive overview of migration towards small towns and rural areas, considering such locales not as marginal, but as fully involved in global dynamics of mobility, inequality, and social change. This volume takes stock of over two decades of research on migration outside metropolitan gateways to stress the plurality, relevance, and richness of theoretical and empirical contributions on a social issue no longer to be considered as “underexplored”.
Focussing on a wide range of international case studies from Europe, North America, Oceania, Africa, and Asia, this collection shows that small towns and rural areas are variously connected in global relations, scalar hierarchies, and mobility patterns, with heterogeneous migration flows, in terms of motivations, trends, and incorporation features. Among the themes explored in its 29 chapters, there are settlement trajectories, the role of civil society and local governance in shaping policy responses, the marginalization and resilience of rural contexts, and exploitative value chains. Furthermore, the Handbook pays specific attention to the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting research in these settings.
This Handbook is an essential resource for scholars and policymakers, offering a nuanced understanding of how migration reshapes the social fabric of small towns and rural areas worldwide.
PYW 22 – Transgressive City-Making and Governance. Housing Struggles, Occupations and Evictions in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area
Authors
Saila-Maria Saaristo (DINÂMIA'CET, Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon)
Type of work
Book
Description
This book interrogates women’s struggles with housing precarity in Lisbon, situating these experiences within the broader dynamics of neoliberal governance, austerity, and housing financialisation. Across Europe, homelessness and evictions are escalating; Portugal exemplifies this trajectory. The absence of state-led housing provision and the commodification of housing have produced structural exclusions that disproportionately affect racialised, low-income women—particularly single mothers—who face systemic barriers to securing stable shelter.
Drawing on seventeen months of multisited activist ethnography (2017–2019) in collaboration with the Lisbon-based housing movement Habita, the book offers an ethnographic account of women’s negotiations with housing insecurity. Unlike large-scale informal settlements common in many cities in the Global South, informality in Lisbon materialises within state housing itself: families occupying vacant council flats without authorisation, municipalities deploying extra-legal practices in homelessness governance, and evictions carried out without viable alternatives.
A feminist reading reveals informality as both a mode of governance and a terrain of survival, shaped by gendered responsibilities and inequalities. Informal occupation emerges as a gendered survival strategy under conditions of structural abandonment. Drawing on Soederberg’s (2021) concept of displaced survival, the book shows how low-income single mothers become trapped in cycles of displacement—evicted from council housing, priced out of private rentals, and denied re-entry into public housing programmes. These exclusions are profoundly gendered, racialised, and classed.
Central to the analysis is the question of agency: How do women act within structures that severely constrain their options? Scholarship on feminist and southern urbanisms challenges reductive notions of agency as resistance or autonomy, instead locating it within constraints, through everyday practices, and in struggles that may be quiet, ambiguous, or transgressive (Mahmood, 2006; Gago, 2017). The book analyses women’s occupations in Lisbon by comparing them with concepts such as “peripheral urbanisation” (Caldeira, 2017), “improvised lives” (Simone, 2019), and what this book terms “transgressive home-making”—practices that exceed or violate regulatory regimes to sustain life. These feminised forms of city-making contest dominant notions of legitimate urban citizenship while addressing immediate needs for care, stability, and survival.
By shifting the lens from legality to care, reproduction, and embodied survival under austerity, the book foregrounds the political significance of women’s housing struggles. It argues that informal occupations are not marginal acts but critical practices of urban citizenship and feminist agency in an era of deepening housing precarity.
The book will be presented by the author, followed by a commentary by Dr. Suraya Scheba (University of Cape Town) and a Q&A session.
References:
Caldeira, T. P. R. (2017). Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), 3–20.
Gago, V. (2017). Neoliberalism from below: Popular pragmatics and baroque economies. Duke University Press.
Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press.
Simone, A. (2019). Improvised lives: Rhythms of endurance in an urban south. Polity.
Soederberg, S. (2021). Urban displacements: Governing surplus and survival in global capitalism. Routledge.
PYW 24 – Citizen X: Becoming Undocumented Activists On Both Sides Of The Atlantic.
Authors
Thomas Swerts (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Type of work
Book
Description
How do undocumented migrants become activists? How can we make sense of the fact that undocumented activists are powerful, resourceful, and hyper-visible yet vulnerable, precarious, and relatively invisible all at once? How do the personal and collective activist trajectories of undocumented migrants diverge and converge on both sides of the Atlantic? And why do the actions they organize from the margins hit politics-as-usual in its very core?
These are the complex and provocative questions that Thomas Swerts poses in Citizen X. Based on years of immersion as an ally in Chicago and Brussels, this transatlantic ethnography offers an unprecedented inside look into the birth, growth, and demise of undocumented-led organizations. In cities on opposite sides of the Atlantic, migrants struggled to create a space from where they could speak their own truth as lived experiences of illegality reinforced their feelings of powerlessness. But as Swerts reveals, under certain conditions, vulnerabilities can be developed into collective strengths.
By openly sharing their stories, contesting restrictions on mobility, and publicly expressing their emotions, undocumented activists expose the hidden reality of ‘Citizen X’. At a time when legal avenues for migration are becoming narrower and undocumented migrants are increasingly criminalized and stigmatized, Citizen X discloses the fundamental inequalities and social injustices that result from unevenly distributing legal status in the world while highlighting the renewed meaning that non-citizens are giving to citizenship from the ground up.
Discussant: Dr. Sarah Schilliger, Universität Bern
PYW 26 – Becoming a Plebeian LeaderMoral Careers, Life-Stories and Statecraft in Guayaquil, Ecuador (1960-2022)
Authors
José Antonio Villarreal Veláquez (FLACSO, Ecuador)
Type of work
Book
Description
In Becoming a Plebeian Leader, José Antonio Villarreal Velásquez examines situations where ordinary women and men become plebeian leaders in urban-popular neighborhoods.
Combining oral history, archival research, and ethnography, the book examines plebeian leaders’ moral careers through and within the meaningful and fluctuating connections among urban-popular neighborhoods in the city, and the nation-state from 1960 to the present time. Specifically, Villarreal Velásquez reconstructs, compares, and explains the historical, sociological, and political formation of two plebeian leaders’ moral career paths in Guayaquil (Ecuador); the skills, feelings, and knowledge they acquired to perform their tasks and operate within societal hegemonic frameworks and large-scale structural transformations.
PYW 27 – Cult of Play: The Culture and Development of Children's Play in Mumbai & Beyond
Authors
Martina Maria Spies
Pritika Akhil Kumar (Co:Lab)
Type of work
Book
Description
Despite its positive impact on the cognitive, emotional and physical development of children, the need for free, safe and hygienic play has often been neglected in the development of India’s megacities. This is especially true in the case of Mumbai, which under the pressure of increasing urbanisation, tremendous socio-spatial inequalities, and densification, has always provided its youngest citizens with limited and ever-diminishing opportunities for play.
Through this book, we examine the status quo concerning play in Mumbai and the different cultures of play produced by its complex urban fabric. Part I serves as an introduction to the research context. Parts II and III present diverse perspectives from notable to make the case for the necessity of play spaces for children, especially in Mumbai’s informal settlements. The diversity of views establishes a collaborative research process, creating rich data while also helping to identify contradictions.
The research project, The Culture and Development of Children’s Play – The socio-cultural influences of playgrounds on the development of children and communities with case studies in Mumbai, on which this publication is based, is laid out in part IV. Here, three chosen informal settlements in Mumbai and the localised ‘cultures of play’ observed are presented along with the key aims of the research project. These include: (a) to learn how playgrounds contribute towards the development of children and their communities; (b) to develop a design tool for sustainable playgrounds for children under the age of 16; and (c) to identify obstacles for building and maintaining playgrounds.
To achieve these aims, the methodology of participatory action research was employed to engage with the resident children and their communities. Looking at informal settlements through their eyes informed us on how to develop these spaces and to understand what is destroyed by bluntly ignoring their needs. The empirical results of the research project showed that it is difficult to identify a singular culture of play. The more general cultures of play in the available play spaces are refracted by their place specificities and the characteristics of the surrounding social and built spaces.
Building on our research, we developed ideas for a spatial system — a design tool — which is presented in the final part of the book. This tool is designed to create opportunities for play within the community itself, on the doorsteps of the houses, surrounded by the community and flowing into the interiors of their homes, without any restrictions of time. To conclude, we reflect upon the evolution of our project, the development of the design tool and the outcomes of the project.
PYW 28 – Informal Housing in the Global North: Exploring Practices, Actors and Processes in a Transforming Housing System
Authors
Jakub Galuszka (HafenCity University Hamburg)
Type of work
Book
Description
Informal Housing in the Global North proposes analytical and conceptual approaches to investigate the progressing ‘informalisation’ of contemporary housing in the Global North and beyond.
Amidst the ongoing housing crisis, the reading of informalities in the so-called North has increasingly disrupted the conventional understanding of local cities as fully regulated, well-structured and formal. By juxtaposing contested, successful and ‘under- the- radar’ ordinary housing phenomena across various income levels, this volume seeks to unpack and document the embeddedness of informality in mid- and high-income cities. This investigation reveals the pervasive and hybrid nature of local housing systems, in which formal frameworks defining modes of utilising spaces and architectural design are continuously reinterpreted by users, public sector actors and market entities alike. It reflects on everyday housing pathways and the agency of those who, by preference or necessity, engage with solutions conventionally labelled as informal.
The volume encompasses cases from Berlin, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Naples, Oxford, Paris and Sydney. It scrutinises the processes shaping a range of housing phenomena and formats, including flat conversions, secondary dwellings, digital rental markets, occupations of public housing, informal settlements, houseboats, refugee accommodation, property caretaking and sub-letting practices.
PYW 29 – Modern Guide on Urban Poverty
Authors
David Benassi (University of Milano-Bicocca)
Enzo Mingione (University of Milano-Bicocca)
Type of work
Book
Description
This Modern Guide provides a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for understanding and addressing urban poverty in contemporary societies. Contributing authors examine in-depth case studies from cities in the Global North and South, adopting a range of approaches from quantitative analyses to in-depth ethnographies.
Chapters highlight how large groups of newly urbanised populations develop informal strategies to cope with extreme living conditions in poor neighborhoods or shantytowns. They illustrate how, amid violence and conflict, these populations create networks of solidarity, forms of resilience and political collectives that demand better living conditions and the right to the city. The book also assesses the ambivalent role of public policies in mitigating or exacerbating urban poverty and explores the emerging realities and trajectories of urban poverty.
Index of the book
Modern Guide on Urban Poverty
Edited by David Benassi, Enzo Mingione and Enrica Morlicchio
Edward Elgar Publishing
Contents
Introduction by the editors
Part I – Macro perspectives on Urban Poverty
1. Urban poverty in the United States by Hilary Silver
2. Social innovation tackling poverty in European cities: The complexity of scales and social transformations by Tatjana Boczy and Yuri Kazepov
3. Urban poverty and policy in Africa by Jeremy Seekings
4. Urbanisation of Poverty in China by Yupeng Zhang
Part II – Urban poverty, dispossession and resistance
5. Pipes, tunnels and veins. Inhabiting the underground of dispossession in Bucharest, Romania by Michele Lancione
6. Urban Poverty and Informality in Southern Europe: A View from Naples by G. Laino and M. Trifuoggi
7. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on urban poverty: A case of the northern region of Bangladesh by Khandaker Mursheda Farhana and Kazi Abdul Mannan
8. Community Action, Social Capital, and Care in Oliver Bond House’s Struggle Against Poverty in Dublin’s Inner City by Lidia K. C. Manzo
9. Dis/possessive geographies: Poverty, violence and private property in the proletarian neighborhoods of Mexico City by Rodrigo Meneses
10. The Vulnerability Context of Homelessness in India’s Capital City: Evaluating the Capacity of Delhi’s Network Shelter Governance System to Meet the Needs of the Homeless by Ashwin Parulkar
Part III – Comparing urban poverty
11. Urban poverty and street vending in Mexico City and Milan by Diego Coletto and Veronica Crossa
12. Bricolage at the urban periphery. Poor people’s strategies in Argentina and Ecuador by Maricarmen Hernández and Javier Auyero
13. The “double movement” and the distribution of urban poverty amongst Lagos and Mexico City’s waste workers by Côme Salvaire
PYW 30 – Tenant Stories
Author
Carolina Gonzalez Redondo (CONICET / IEALC-UBA)
Type of work
Documentary
Description
Maca rents an apartment in Flores; Sergio, a studio in the Mugica neighborhood (formerly Villa 31); Yani lives in a room in a residential hotel in Constitución. Their stories are different, as are their present lives, but they share one condition: being tenants in the city of Buenos Aires. Through their experiences, Tenant Stories invites viewers to reflect on renting as a way of accessing housing. At the same time, this documentary aims to share the results of the Tenant Survey, conducted annually by various academic institutions and civil society organizations in Buenos Aires.
PYW 31 – The Non-Post-Socialist City: Urban Policymaking in Central and Eastern Europe
Author
Łukasz Drozda (University of Warsaw)
Type of work
Book
Description
The Non-Post-Socialist City examines contemporary urban policies through case studies of six cities in four states across Central and Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union (CEE/FSU) region.
This book adopts a rarely used approach in the study of so-called post-socialist cities—combining several years of in-depth empirical research with a broad comparative frame. Building on this foundation, it analyzes urban policymaking processes in Leipzig (Germany), Warsaw and Krakow (Poland), Tallinn (Estonia), and Kyiv and Lviv (Ukraine). The monograph interprets these dynamics through the author’s concept of diluted post-socialism, which highlights not only trajectories rooted in the Soviet-dominated era but also a range of pre- or nonsocialist legacies that interact with—and often complicate—the few decades of now-defunct state-socialist rule. Particular attention is given to four policy fields: mobility, green infrastructure, housing, and spatial planning. While these domains pose broadly similar dimensions across the six cities, their organization reveals a highly diverse urban landscape that is too often flattened under the “post-socialist” label.
The book is intended for scholars, analysts, students, and anyone interested in urbanization processes in the former Eastern bloc, as well as in the impact of the global populist turn on urban policymaking within this region and in a broader urban context.
PYW 32 – Caste and Emancipatory Quest: Ethnography of Dalits in an Urban Neighborhood
Author
Rama Devi (Centre De Sciences Humaines, Delhi)
Type of work
Book
Description
Caste and Emancipatory Quest explores the intertwined relationship between caste and the city, tracing how this interaction continually (re)produces distinct forms of urban stratification. In post-independence India, the fate of caste has been vigorously debated, often leading to a spatialized understanding of caste identity. Rural spaces have been widely perceived as the natural terrain in which caste persists, whereas its manifestations in urban contexts have received limited scholarly attention. The urban, imagined as a modern domain, has frequently been positioned as detached from entrenched structures of oppression—an aspirational, emancipatory space for historically marginalized communities.
Drawing on a qualitative study of a predominantly Dalit neighbourhood in Delhi, this book interrogates the emancipatory promise of the city. Through an ethnographic account of neighbourhood dynamics, intergenerational mobility, and political life, it illuminates how caste continues to shape Dalit experiences, everyday interactions, opportunities, and economic trajectories in urban settings. It argues that the metropolitan city functions as a liminal space: while it offers meaningful avenues for aspiration and upward mobility, it simultaneously imposes structural constraints that impede Dalits’ efforts to achieve the mobility they seek.
PYW 34 – Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar
Authors
Kanupriya Dhingra (School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University, India; The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, SHARP)
Type of work
Book
Description
Published as an Element in the Publishing and Book Culture series by Cambridge University Press, this “minigraph” looks at Old Delhi’s Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as the Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, as a parallel location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities. The first section studies the bazaar’s spatiality—its location, relocation, and respatialisation. Three actors play a major role in creating and organising this spatiality: the sellers, the buyers, and the civic authorities. The second section narrativizes the biographies of the booksellers of Daryaganj to offer a map of the hidden social and material networks that support the informal modes of bookselling. Amidst order and chaos, using their specialised knowledge, Daryaganj booksellers create distinctive mechanisms to serve the diverse reading public of Delhi. Using ethnography, oral interviews, and rhythmanalysis, this Element tells a story of urban aspirations, state–citizen relations, official and unofficial cultural economies, and imaginations of other viable worlds of being and believing.
Relevance for the conference:
Situated within wider debates on the sustainability and inequities of contemporary urban life, this Element positions the Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar as a microcosm through which to study how cities negotiate precarity, aspiration, and coexistence. The bazaar’s evolving spatiality, shaped by periodic displacement, regulatory pressures, and everyday negotiations between sellers, buyers, and civic authorities, mirrors the broader urban challenges highlighted by the conference: uneven access to space, social and economic fragmentation, and the tensions between formal governance and informal urban practices.
At a time when cities globally confront pollution, spatial segregation, and shifting political and economic forces, the story of Daryaganj offers a grounded account of how historical urban forms intersect with new pressures. The relocation of the bazaar and the ongoing bureaucratic interventions illustrate how informal cultural economies are repeatedly reshaped by state-led visions of order and progress. Yet the market’s endurance, sustained through improvisation, collective labour, and affective ties between sellers and readers, demonstrates how marginalised urban actors adapt to and resist these pressures.
By bringing together ethnography and rhythmanalysis, the Element contributes to the conference’s methodological concerns, showing how close attention to the everyday rhythms of an informal marketplace can illuminate lived experiences of inequality, authority, and belonging. Old Delhi’s booksellers reveal how alternative urban futures are imagined and enacted not at the scale of masterplans but through small, continuous acts of making space, forging networks, and sustaining access to knowledge. In doing so, the Element offers a textured understanding of how cultural resilience operates within cities marked by both deep historical processes and rapidly evolving contemporary challenges.
Further information:
(1) https://linktr.ee/kanupriyadhingra
(2) https://www.instagram.com/booksofdelhi/
PYW 35 – "Esto es el boro". Vidas en la periferia
Author
William Alvarez (Observatorio del Caribe Colombiano)
Type of work
Book
Description
The work explores the emergence of gangs and the dynamics of their violence, particularly in the peripheries of Cartagena. Through an ethnography of approximately three years, it provides a dense description of the various ways in which violence manifests among these groups, as well as its scope and territorial deployment. The research is situated in Rafael Núñez, a small sector within one of Cartagena’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods, with a high proportion of Afro-Caribbean residents. It seeks to establish a connection between the rise of gangs, their forms of violence, and the historical effects of structural sociopolitical marginalization—reflected in the asymmetrical social distribution of space, labor precariousness, and ethno-racial segregation—which has generated an uncontrolled rage among the youth directed both at their own community and the rest of the city.
PYW 36 – Viennese Constellations: Explorations of Housing and the “New Vienna”
Author
Christoph Reinprecht (University of Vienna)
Nora Walch (University of Vienna)
Juma Hauser (freelance artist)
Type of work
Book
Description
This small book is designed as an invitation to explore ten sites across different Viennese neighborhoods connected to the history of housing. The addresses are drawn from extensive documentation assembled as part of a research project on sociological sites in Vienna. What links these locations is their significance to the early history of Viennese housing research—from the turn of the twentieth century to Red Vienna in the interwar years. Framed by an essay on the history of (social) housing in Vienna, each site reveals a distinct perspective on the changing materiality and meanings of housing: from its scientific exploration to its transformation in the present, while also prompting reflections on the future of housing in our cities. To encounter these places today is to be reminded of what New Vienna aspired to be more than a century ago—and of what it still might become.