Round Tables

Chairs/Moderators

David Kaufmann (ETH Zürich)
Mona Fawaz (American University of Beirut)

Round table participants

Jonathan Darling (Durham University)
Liza Weinstein (North Eastern University)
René Kreichauf (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Dolf te Lintelo (Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies)

Description

Driven by humanitarian discourses that frame forced displacement as exceptional within a state-centric reading of population movements, much of the urban scholarship has adopted a crisis framing in its approach to refugee migrations. Consequently, studies investigating the urbanization of forced displacement have tended to approach refugee populations, their practices, governance, and the responses to their settlement in isolation of other forces that shape today’s cities. However, most urban refugees inscribe themselves in cities alongside other vulnerable urban populations: They access shelter as tenants through the channels of informal housing markets, work as precarious labor, and sometimes negotiate visibility and political identities through the “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1996). Moreover, the conditions urban refugees face, the possibilities they find, and the restrictions they endure are shaped by the same forces that shape today’s cities.

This roundtable brings together scholars working on the intersection of forced displacement with urbanization in multiple national and regional contexts. The roundtable approaches displacement as an integral part of the unfolding processes that have historically shaped cities and continue to produce contemporary urbanization. Through critical engagement with existing scholarships and practice, participants will explore how refugee arrival and settlement intersect with processes such as housing and land financialization, neoliberal governance, gray-spacing, the militarization of security, climate change, or the rise of right-wing populist politics. The roundtable seeks to foster comparative dialogues cross-city through grounded discussions of methods, theoretical framings, and case studies particularly focused on the complex intersections of housing, displacement, and urban transformation, drawing connections across Global North and Global South settings.

Key questions include:

  • How are modalities of housing tenure open to refugees influenced by the changing nature of housing markets (e.g., housing financialization, adoption of platforms in housing markets)
  • How does the arrival of urban refugees reorganize existing urban social hierarchies, particularly landlord-tenant relations?
  • How and why are diverse actors (e.g., State actors, NGOs, IOs, FBOs, business) sometimes cooperating together in urban refugee policies and practices?
  • How do humanitarian shelter interventions reverberate through local housing markets, and what unforeseen linkages, opportunities, or exclusions do they generate?
  • How do decades of neo-liberal economic policies affect the abilities of local authorities to respond to displacement?
  • How does the rise of right-wing populist movements influence the governance of displacement and refugees’ ability to negotiate pathways of urban integration?
  • How can we locate contemporary humanitarian responses in the context of historical policies that have governed forced displacement?

Chairs/Moderators

Mona Fawaz (American University of Beirut)
Hiba Bou Akar (Columbia University)

Round table participants

Daniel Agbiboa (Harvard University)
Sobia Kaker (University of Essex)

Description

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audrey Lorde warned us. For urbanists, and more generally academics and members of institutions of higher learning, this provocation carries renewed urgency. The methods, categories, and interventions that define our disciplines, particularly urban planning and design, have been and remain deeply implicated in the conception, implementation, and consolidation of settler colonialism in Palestine, both past and present. Whether through practices of spatial planning, forms of biopolitical governance, or modes of attributing value, academic research has been complicit in justifying and supporting erasure (Yiftachel 2000). This panel invites contributions that interrogate the liberatory possibilities and limits of our disciplinary tools at a time when genocide and erasure are unfolding across Gaza, the West Bank, and beyond.

Building on long-standing critiques of the academy’s complicity in imperial and colonial projects, we ask: How might urbanists reckon with its own intellectual architectures, its theories of space, development, and governance that reproduce domination and dispossession? Is it possible to find liberatory tools within practices that have already solidified oppression, displacement, and control? If so, how can we rethink these tools, and how can we shift the discourse around them to open space for justice, resistance, and collective repair? What responsibilities do we bare as scholars situated within institutions and epistemologies entangled with empire? Beyond complicity, what solidarities and aspirations can we offer?

The round table will bring critical, reflexive, and politically committed interventions that engage with the urban as a site of both colonial violence and potential liberation.

Chairs/Moderators

Fiorenza Gamba (University of Geneva, Switzerland)

Round table participants

Sandro Cattacin (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Vincent Kaufmann (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, France)
Mark Vacher (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Letteria Grazia Fassari (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)
Adrian Favell (University College Cork)

Description

Cities are characterised by pluralism. This fact is becoming increasingly relevant in the practice of urban governance and planning. The handling of differences and vulnerabilities is usually based on an understanding that favours or privileges only one individual feature (such as income) and addresses only specific groups. This produces a restrictive understanding of differences and vulnerabilities, that imposes exclusive features on individuals or groups, thereby simplify complex identities and reduces inequalities to a limited extent.
Individualisation, anarchic community building, mobility and globalisation – and all the current multiplies crisis – are all changing cities and challenging the traditional modus of governing collective spaces (Sassen 2002).

The contemporary trend is toward differentiation and increasing complexity (von Beyme 1992) – toward singular complex (intersectional) identities rather than larger, homogeneous group identities (Cho et al. 2013) – and a focus on the heterogeneity of people living in the same territories, in particular urban ones (Pattaroni 2006; Vertovec 2007; Tasan-Kok et al. 2013).
This heterogeneity and complexity challenge the conceptual categories and analyses that have long been employed in the social sciences, encouraging us to to venture into uncertain and “imperfect” territory (Le Galès and Robinson 2024).

There are various loci from which to examine how such complexity can be managed. One such locus is the organisation of urban spaces and urban mobility. There are also different ways to study how cities deal with contemporary challenges. One of these is to take into consideration how differences embodied in contemporary societies are shaped by and framed in contemporary urban contexts. The increasing differentiation in modern societies is most pronounced in cities, especially in urban areas with a highly mobile population (Viry and Kaufmann 2015). Cities attract people from all over the world with diverse origins, religious practices, socioeconomic statuses and everyday practices (Cattacin 2009), and modern cities and their governance are forced to respond to this heterogeneity and demographic change. Although policies regarding, for instance, social security or health needs are usually made at the national level, cities offer an interesting context for the investigation of territorialised practices, because they are confronted with highly diverse lifestyles and specific vulnerabilities, which can turn rapidly on inequalities, and are therefore especially affected by the question of the inclusion of differences. It is also in urban areas that we see a concentrated mobilisation of special resources and innovative, specialised infrastructure implemented at the local level and supported through the participation of all sorts of stakeholders to better respond to the needs of a highly differentiated population (Cattacin 2011). This also has the effect of tackling inequality.

In this roundtable we will discuss with our guests, and then open to audience, on the concepts and practices adopted by cities to deal with these differences and to develop new approaches to planning and thinking the city that promote the inclusion of specific vulnerabilities and, in general, differences.

Chairs/Moderators

Tomáš Hoření Samec (Faculty of Architecture, Brno University of Technology; Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
Luise Stoisser (Society and ageing research lab)

Round table participants

Darinka Czischke (Delft University of Technology – TU Delft)
Jan Malý Blažek (Brno University of Technology)
Lucia Chaloin (University Grenoble Alps)
Vattani Saray-Delabar (Université Gustave Eiffel)

Description

In recent years, collaborative housing has been adopted as an umbrella term describing forms of housing which accentuate self-organisation, collectivity, and sharing in housing provision. The reasons for developing these forms are often related to inequalities and inadequacies in terms of access to (urban) housing markets, environmental challenges, or social isolation. Existing research shows that many contemporary collaborative housing projects emerge as a response to increasingly financialized housing systems, which are predominantly based on individual private homeownership or rental housing. The former being increasingly less acceptable for market-newcomers of younger age and lower-incomes while the later being often linked to a variety of housing disadvantages and precarities. However, while collaborative housing presents a promising innovation in housing provision, it has also been critiqued as potentially too exclusive or constrained by the formal criteria set up by stakeholders (e.g., municipalities) who provide public support (such as long term land lease).

The aim of this round table is twofold: on the one hand, we will discuss how (in)equality is manifested and (re)produced in collaborative housing following-up on the recent vigorous debates on the character of housing and urban inequalities, insecurities and disadvantages; on the other, we want to offer a hopeful, yet critical, account on how collaborative housing may serve to mitigate various and often intersecting inequalities. We aim to provide an account which brings the perspectives from the Northern Western, Central-Eastern and Southern Europe perspectives and finds bridges across the variety of geographical settings and urban scales from major cities such as Vienna or Brussels to the more locally oriented ethnographic research in Italy, Portugal or the Czech Republic.

Next to highlighting the potential of collaborative housing, we aim to discuss (1) tensions arising between formal inclusion criteria set by city governments (e.g., income limits) and inclusion criteria agreed upon by residents (e.g., proportion of LGBTQ+/older residents) in collaborative housing groups that work together with institutional stakeholders, such as social housing organisations; (2) relational aspects of (in)equalities which present the various housing hierarchies as a dynamic interplay between civic, public and private stakeholders with often contingent results as manifested in (3) contradictions embedded in top-down projects that, on the one hand, tend to prioritize the housing inclusion of vulnerable groups reducing social inequalities they experience, and on the other hand, produce wider inequalities of power between institutional actors initiating these projects and the residents.

Co-organisers:

Jeroen Klink (CEFAVELA/Federal University of ABC, Brazil)
Camila Saraiva (CEFAVELA/Federal University of ABC, Brazil)

Chair/Moderator

Jeroen Klink (CEFAVELA/Federal University of ABC, Brazil)

Round table participants

Camila Saraiva
Research Fellow, Center for Favela Studies (CEFAVELA), Federal University of ABC, Brazil
Karen Coelho
Honorary Fellow, School of Social Sciences, University of Waikato, New Zealand
Retired Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India
 Xuefei Ren
Professor, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, United States
Lindsay Sawyer
Senior Researcher, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Description

Informal settlements have come to represent a kind of metonym for the contemporary metropolis in the Global South. Since the 1960s, we have seen the emergence of vibrant debates and policy experiments around aided self-help and management, sites-and-services schemes, and in-situ upgrading linked to income and employment generation programs. These initiatives sought to support communities’ claims to livelihoods and, ultimately, their right to the city. At the same time, dramatic transformations have taken place in the built environment since then, such as increasing densities, emerging building typologies, and the blurring of boundaries between the “formal” and the “informal.” These shifts are intertwined with evolving relationships between markets, states, and collective actors, all of which shape the contested production and appropriation of space in these territories.

This context suggests that progressive, rights-based upgrading policies – as we thought we knew them – must be carefully reconsidered in light of the realities of today’s metropolises in the Global South.
To what extent have developmental discourses and approaches – whether rights-based, progressive, or conservative – that envision cities without slums, or aim for their “integration,” contributed to a kind of permanent transitoriness of informality and precarity?
How can we imagine forms of statecraft that engage with the socially embedded norms and conventions of informal markets, while also mobilizing the vibrancy and solidarity of community networks in these settlements?
To what extent are newly emerging collective actors – such as gangs, religious organizations, artists and cultural movements, real estate platforms, and large-scale professional developers – reshaping the dynamics of informal settlements and influencing the outcomes of upgrading processes?
How do today’s informal settlements challenge internationally established slum upgrading paradigms, which were largely consolidated in the twentieth century?
And finally, how can we mobilize diverse “geographies of theory” to better understand the production of informal settlements and the experiments in upgrading – without falling into the traps of either exceptionalism or universalism?

This roundtable seeks to foster an international dialogue on these issues grounded in the diverse trajectories of informal settlements and upgrading experiments across cities of the Global South.

Chair/Moderator

Jeff Maskovsky (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

Round table participants

Ayşe Çağlar (University of Vienna - Institute for Human Sciences)
Julian Brash (Montclair State University, USA)
Cindi Katz (CUNY, USA)
Penn Ip (Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong Kong)
Omnia Khalil (CUNY, USA)
Sharryn M. Kasmir (Hofstra University, USA)

Description

Liberalism is all too frequently associated with urban political formations. Across the world, cities are often celebrated as cosmopolitan antidotes to ethnic nationalist, authoritarian, and reactionary political developments. They are frequently seen as tolerant, enlightened enclaves that must be defended against assaults by resentful, angry, and reactionary forces associated with the hinterland. But the liberal urbanite versus reactionary provincialist binary contains just enough truth to make it very misleading. In this roundtable we seek a more historically, geographically, and ethnographically nuanced understanding of authoritarian populism and other forms of illiberal politics. We develop the concept of illiberal urbanism to unsettle conventional urbanist claims that equate liberalism with urbanity, and we explore instead the multiplicity of liberal and illiberal forces, projects, and antagonisms that shape political life in our urbanizing world.

We are especially interested in probing the connection of illiberal city-making to urbanizing inequalities. Panelists will trace the rise of coercive governing practices and their role in enabling carceral forms of containment, dominant class, race, and gender politics, pernicious securitization schemes, violent counter-insurgency efforts, and the extractivist dynamics of racial capitalist city-making on a global scale. In our discussion, we will examine different urban political regimes from the authoritarian to the putatively neoliberal to tease out frequently unexamined connections between illiberal government on the one hand and new patterns of inequality on the other.

Together, we will devise answers to difficult questions such as, how are coercive forms of urban government, safety and security spatialized across different metropolitan landscapes? How do mass incarceration, segregation, and inequality surface in cities today? How do counterinsurgency, surveillance and securitization affect city-making projects today? What are the class, gender, and racial dimensions of contemporary urbanized inequalities? How do illiberal and liberal measures combine in contemporary forms of city-making? And, most importantly, what kinds of counter- or alter-politics can overcome the production of illiberal inequalities?

Participants are part of a multi-year project called Mutations of Urbanism. We are an international, interdisciplinary scholarly collective organized to explore emancipatory political possibilities and changing urban forms.

Chairs/Moderators

Helen Pineo (University of Washington)

Round table participants

Eduardo Marques (University of São Paulo)
Myfanwy Taylor (University College London)
Geraint Ellis (Queen’s University Belfast)
María José Álvarez (University of the Andes)
Elis Borde (Federal University of Minas Gerais)

Description

This session will open a conversation about comparing similar processes in cities from different contexts. In particular, the session is interested in how collective action is facilitating or contributing to equitable urban change and at the same time, how this process often becomes invisibilized when cities tell their stories of social change. We present three case studies from a comparative research project to receive feedback from experts and an informed audience on comparison and social movements research and to invite a broader discussion on this topic.

In Belfast, the research team examined community advocacy and activism for housing rights in city emerging from ethno-nationalist conflict and in the midst of contested immigration. In Belo Horizonte, the team studied the city’s food security policies, and the way that community and social movement-led practices based on solidarity and resistance have shaped urban policy over time. Finally, Bogotá illuminates the role of women’s social movements in advocating for marginalized groups. They do this through official governance processes, which are at the root of the achievements in care infrastructure and other policies.

Our case studies trace the history of these interventions for urban change over time. We describe their present form in detail to unearth their complexities, moving beyond simplified ‘best practices’. We bring invisibilized stories – other voices – to the forefront, documenting collective actors’ efforts in meeting the everyday needs of excluded populations. In addition to a researcher from each city, this roundtable invites two experts on political change and community-engaged research to open conversations about these issues with other participants.

Chairs/Moderators

Prathiwi Widyatmi Putri (Independent researcher, Kassel, Germany)
Jan Hui Min Lim (KU Leuven)

Round table participants

Elisa T. Bertuzzo (DAAD-Lecturer Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung Indonesia; Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin)
Petra Tschakert (Department of Geography, National University of Singapore)
Marc Pradel Miquel (Department of Sociology, University of Barcelona)

Description

In the face of extensive and expansive capitalist metabolic processes continually extracting water and soil capacities, and depleting them, society-nature relations are in need of urgent transformation. The round table addresses social-ecological transformations through the analytical lenses of agency, boundaries and the city (ABC). Critical urban theories have helped unpack how capital’s institutions and structures, mediated by state power, shape the production of socio-nature on a planetary scale (following e.g. Maria Kaika and Alex Loftus), yet with unequal levels of disadvantage that mirror global, and explicitly colonial, imbalances (see Farhana Sultana, 2022). With the return of both Marxist ontological monist and analytical dualist approaches to nature-and-society (following Kohei Seito, but also Nancy Fraser and Jason Moore on their takes on social movement strategy), it is also necessary to bring back the morphogenetic approach to structure-and-agency (following Margareth Archer, Andrew Sayer and Bob Jessop). Theoretically informed in these ways, our main goal is to provide guidelines that are instructive for our research and collective actions, empirically referring to the environmental (self)governance of cities in the Southeast Asian archipelagoes.

The session invites reflections on:

1. Transformative agencies
Public water utilities, water-user associations, housing developers, planners, landscape architects, garbage collectors, urban farmers and soil literacy movements seasonal and migratory species, etc., are just a few among the agencies involved in transforming urban environments, in specific spatial-temporal rhythms. How might we understand the transformative potential of agencies (individual or collective) that are enacted through alternative imaginaries and caring practices for water and soils in the city? In which roles and role-entanglements might such agencies be able to engage in (prefigurative) collective actions? How do we better account for the unequal agential distribution of (climate) disadvantage in analyzing these processes?

2. Social-ecological Boundaries
Many existing institutional-material boundaries lock the alternative potentials such as small-scale, environment-friendly technological systems, not-for-profit food cooperatives, state-community partnerships for livelihoods, etc. What are the key organising principles (in the forms of institutions) that keep us reproducing extractive and destructive urban metabolism? Which are the specificities of the boundaries in Southeast Asia arising from the combination of colonial legacies and, for example, new global labour divisions impacted by the industrialization processes of countries such as Japan, Korea, or China? Which alternative boundaries could give rise to diverse forms of socioecological reciprocity and care, also taking into account the Southeast Asian climate and extreme natural calamities?

3. Transformative Cities
The spatial formations of social-ecological systems – rural-urban boundaries, formal and informal settlements, etc. – are constantly shaped by both agential and institutional dimensions. For cities to function as critical spatial nodes for socio-ecological transformations, in what scalar articulations (of society-and-ecology) can alternative political, governance and economic configurations better support a multiplicity of agencies that push and pull at prevailing institutional-material boundaries, to create new roles and relational practices and secure long-term productive and progresive collective actions?

Chair/Moderator

Karl Krähmer (University of Turin)

Round table participants

Federico Savini (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Sarah Ware (Central European University, Austria)
Angelos Varvarousis (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain)
Nikos Katsikis (TU Delft, The Netherlands)
Roberta Cucca (Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway)

Description

Degrowth has gained wide traction as both a critique of contemporary capitalism and an agenda for emancipatory and democratic spatial politics. Scholars from many disciplines, activists from socio-ecological movements and progressive governments recognize the potential of degrowth propositions to address the intertwined challenges of worsening social inequality, ecological breakdown, and democratic backsliding. In political practice, degrowth is bridging multiple communities, inspiring struggles for reduction of the social metabolism, sufficiency, care, labour rights, as well as those advocating for phasing out fossil capital, capping extreme wealth, and fostering anti-authoritarianism and anti-colonialism.

Despite its increasing visibility and popularity in both research and practice, degrowth still lacks a thorough and systematic development of a spatial perspective. For research, it lacks a theory of spatial change capable of connecting transformations and struggles occurring at multiple scales: from the everyday practices of altering consumption patterns to local and regional conflicts around growth-fueled investments, contesting the geopolitics of planetary urbanization. Consequently, degrowth-informed research runs the risk of scalar traps: a naïve universalism or a folkloristic localism. A spatial perspective, which is multiscalar and relational, can help to both calibrate radical degrowth practices to specific socio-cultural contexts and to interconnect them within a theory and practice of contesting planetary dynamics of extractivism and exploitation.

The roundtable opens a dialogue between degrowth and spatial politics for both research and practice. Space is addressed as a relation of power, simultaneously a condition, a means and a target of degrowth politics. A degrowth transformation necessarily implies a reorganization of socio-metabolic relations, stocks and flows of matter, capital and energy across spatial scales, and a different cultural imaginary of how we as humans conceptualize our relation to spatial dynamics. If degrowth envisions a spatial politics that counteracts the underlying socio-cultural frames that sustain intrinsically toxic growth ideologies, cultures and institutions, then it needs a theory (and a practice) able to explain how its values are embedded and practiced through multi-scalar socio-spatial transformations.

The round table panel will discuss the following questions:

  • What makes a spatial perspective different from an a-spatial perspective in the analysis of a growth-focused society and in the development of trajectories of a degrowth transformation?
  • What are the current perspectives on theories of socio-spatial change in degrowth research and practice? What are their limits for radical action?
  • What kind of contribution can a degrowth perspective bring to existing radical perspectives on inequality such as planetary urbanization, land struggles, urban extractivism, green gentrification?

Chairs/Moderators

Giulia Torino (London School of Economics)
Suzi Hall (The London School of Economics and Political Science)

Round table participants

Nishat Awan (UCL Urban Laboratory)
Ali Bhagat (School of Public Policy, Simon Fraser University)
Dalia Gebrial (King’s College London) 
Matt Mahmoudi (University of Cambridge)
Junxi Qian (Hong Kong University)

Description

This roundtable explores how racial borders shape, and are shaped by, the contemporary urban condition. We understand borders not only as geopolitical spaces but also embodied, infrastructural, and urban processes. In the ordinary life of cities, they are enforced through policing, housing and shelter, formal and informal labour markets, and governance (Mahmoudi, 2025; Bhagat, 2024; Torino, 2023; Gebrial, 2022; Qian, 2022; Hall, 2021; Awan, 2016), among others.

By taking the questions posed by escalating border violences and border regimes around the world seriously (De Genova, 2017; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), this panel will discuss an underrepresented relation in urban studies and past RC21 conferences: between racial capitalism (Gilmore, 2022; Robinson, 2020[1983]; Bhattacharyya, 2018), migration regimes, and the city. In doing so, it will address questions such as: How do urban spaces become laboratories of bordering? How do racial borders materialise in the city, and how do communities and solidarity movements inhabit, contest, and rework them? What methods can be used to effectively investigate the workings of racial borders in and beyond cities? And what conceptual tools—e.g. racial borderscapes, necropolitics, racial capitalism—help us grasp these dynamics?

To approach these questions, the roundtable brings together early career and more established scholars to advance a conversation on urban racial bordering as both a structural condition of the global present and a terrain of radical possibility for more just urban futures, opening generative avenues for critical urban studies and cognate disciplines:

Nishat Awan is Professor of Architecture & Visual Culture at UCL Urban Laboratory, whose research visually attends to transnational mobility and the spatial-geopolitical representation of borders ‘otherwise’, particularly in the UK and Pakistan, among others.

Ali Bhagat is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy, Simon Fraser University, researching refugee mobilities and livelihoods, migration policy, and intersectional political economy in Kenya, France, Canada, and South Africa.

Dalia Gebrial is Assistant Professor of Geography & Social Justice at King’s College London, where her research interrogates the geographies of empire, race, and labour, across the digital and political economies of London and the UK.

Matt Mahmoudi is Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge, where he researches how “smart” urban systems reproduce racial capitalism, particularly across digital urban infrastructures of migration control, in the USA, Germany, and Palestine.

Junxi Qian is Associate Professor of Geography at Hong Kong University, whose research bridges geography, urban studies, and cultural studies, focusing on urban–rural systems, cultural economies, and the everyday geographies of borders in China.

Session organisers:

Giulia Torino is Assistant Professor of Urban Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she researches spaces of displacement and migration, urban margins, Southern urbanisms, and the racial political economy of housing/labour, particularly in Colombia and the Mediterranean.

Suzi Hall is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science; her urban ethnographic work examines migration, street economies, and racialised dimensions of bordering and everyday urban life in the UK and South Africa.

Chair/Moderator

Julia Wesely (Urban Sustainability Living Lab, University of Vienna, Austria)

Round table participants

Francisco de Assis Comaru (Laboratório Justiça Territorial – LabJuta, University of ABC, Brazil)
Kerstin Krellenberg (Urban Sustainability Living Lab, University of Vienna, Austria)
Catalina Ortiz (UCL Urban Lab, University College London, UK)
Harutyun Vermishyan (Territorial Studies and Development Lab, Yerevan State University, Armenia)

Description

Urban Labs are increasingly popular modes for co-producing transdisciplinary knowledge on key urban issues. Particularly in the field of urban sustainability transformations, actors from research and practice have argued that social innovation and experimentation are required to address complex sustainability challenges and the structural inequalities at their core (Almeida and Deutsch 2025). 

Here, the messy context of “the urban” serves to re-frame the pristine image of the laboratory, while the complex realities of urban dwellers transgress epistemic and heuristic boundaries of a controlled experiment. Acknowledging that the starting points, goals, foci, institutional set-up and spatial-temporal configurations of Urban Labs over the world are highly heterogeneous, the roundtable discussion focuses particularly on university-based Urban Labs. This is due to their underlying promise of establishing a new social contract between universities and cities; where hierarchies of knowledge and practice are questioned and re-worked to become fruitful for transformative change (John 2024). Yet, their impacts, in terms of the change they produce, including their ability to address structural inequalities, remain limited and uncertain. What, then, can be learnt across Urban Labs to strengthen knowledges about their enabling conditions as well as their (transformative) impacts?

In the context of evolving research on enabling conditions for university-based Urban Labs, this roundtable also recognises how academic discourses on Urban Labs are currently strongly biased towards Western understandings (Roll et al. 2024). This is particularly concerning as numerous Urban Labs from the East and South hold profound experiences across teaching, research and extension, and provide ample conceptual, methodological and practical entry points to exchange, learn from, and learn across (Kohler et al. 2021). Moreover, although being firmly contextualised in their localities, many Urban Labs are deeply entangled in global-local networks: be it through international research projects and funding streams, participation in multilateral city alliances, and engagement with the localisation of global sustainable development agendas, among many other dimensions.

The roundtable discussion therefore brings into conversation experiences from emerging and established Urban Labs associated with universities across diverse geographies such as Armenia, Brazil, the UK and Austria. It seeks to curate cross-learning in multiple directions, making explicit their local, and in particular their translocal dimensions and connections. 

The roundtable discussion will address the following topics:

  • Contributions of Urban Labs from Southern, Eastern, and Western cities towards pluralising global and translocal city networks and alliances
  • Innovative co-learning methodologies and critical pedagogies within and between Urban Labs
  • Roles and responsibilities of Urban Labs in addressing (in-)justices and inequalities in university-city relations
  • Long-term experiences of resourcing and institutionalizing Urban Labs
  • Social and material (transformative) impacts of Urban Labs

The roundtable discussion is organised with co-funding from the Urban Studies Journal.

Chair/Moderator

Öznur Yardımcı (University of York)

Round table participants

Oskar Verkaaik (University of Amsterdam)
Martin Lundsteen (University of Barcelona)
Devran Koray Öcal (University of Bern)
Daryl Martin (University of Maynooth)

Description

This roundtable explores mosque building in contemporary Western European cities as a central site where national belonging, citizenship and racialised forms of urban governance are negotiated. Moving beyond common framings of mosques as faith-based spaces or security concerns, the session foregrounds their sociological, anthropological, urban, political geographic and political economic significance. In contexts marked by the rise of right‑wing populist nationalism where Islamophobia plays a central role, mosque projects become key terrains on which struggles over urban space, racialised governance, and the symbolic and material bordering of the political community unfold. 

Building on scholarship that conceptualises mosque planning as a site of boundary-making, between insiders and outsiders (Gale, 2004; 2005), Western/non-Western others (Villis and Hebing, 2014), or the ‘community of value’ (Yardımcı and Martin, 2024), the roundtable brings together scholars working across diverse Western European contexts to reflect comparatively on mosque projects, from the initial planning stage to post-construction everyday use. 

In line with the conference theme on inequalities, the session will consider how mosque planning, development and use reflect and reproduce prevalent and emerging forms of racialised urban governance and everyday bordering of the political community. It will also explore the political economy and political geography of mosque buildings in relation to broader urban planning contexts in which they are embedded. 

By bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars spanning anthropology, political geography, urban studies and sociology, the roundtable offers a historically grounded and comparative lens on mosque building as an urban intervention that reshapes the production of urban space, everyday practices of bordering, and the governance of belonging and citizenship in contemporary Western Europe.

Politics of Belonging amid Right-Wing Populism  

  • What political, symbolic, and social work do mosques perform in contemporary Western European cities beyond their roles as religious spaces?
  • How are the discourses and spatial strategies of right‑wing populist and nationalist movements negotiated, contested, or reconfigured through mosque planning, architecture and everyday use?

Architecture, Planning and Urban Space 

  • How do national and local planning regimes interact to shape mosque architecture, design, and spatial integration in Western European cities?
  • What forms of spatial transformation —symbolic, material, or infrastructural— do mosques generate within and beyond their immediate urban localities?

Concluding Reflections on Mosques as Spaces of Citizenship 

  • How do mosque projects facilitate, mediate, or challenge the social, spatial, and political‑economic configurations of community, national belonging, citizenship, and multiculturalism in Western European cities amid the rise of Islamophobic nationalism?

Chair/Moderator

Catalina Ortiz (UCL)
Natalia Villamizar Duarte (Newcastle University)

Round table participants

Elsa Noterman (University of Nottingham)
Olivia Casagrande (The University of Sheffield)
Arielle Gonçalves Vieira (University of Brasília, UnB)
Valeria Lazarenko (Universität Hamburg)
Lou Elena Bouey (University of Cambridge)
Luce Beeckmans (KU Leuven)
Aliki Tzouvara (KU Leuven)
Monica Martin Grau (The University of Sheffield)
Johanna Brugman (School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland)

Description

City-making is a by-product of racial capitalism and a global colonial history of protracted violence. As a result, the multiple harms, territorial wounds and collective trauma have produced and continued to be reproduced urban inequalities that demand new frameworks for conceptualising reparation and territorial healing (Ortiz and Gómez Córdoba, 2023) in cities. This roundtable seeks to frame the political project of reparative justice in urban spaces by opening the debate about practices to heal wounds from epistemic, racial, slow and colonial violence emerging in cities.

The roundtable looks for contributions addressing the profound challenges of climate catastrophe, colonial violence, armed conflict, and authoritarianism that continue to shape urban landscapes. Our aim is to collectively explore how a reparative planning praxis—one that acknowledges territories as living entities—can contribute to healing our damaged relationships with each other and with the Earth. By reframing urban studies as a territorial and ethical praxis, this roundtable positions urban scholarship as central to repairing the planetary civilizational crisis we inhabit.

We would like to expand this debate by engaging in questions such as:

How do processes and practices of reparative justice activate the spatial imagination of communities affected by violence-related trauma?
How can territorial healing and reparative planning perspectives transform cross-disciplinary urban research and practice?
How can we connect place-based memories of violence, healing and reparation with urban policy, planning and design?
What do creative and collaborative methods offer critical urban and civic pedagogies to foster territorial reparation and healing?

References:
Ortiz, C. & Gómez Córdoba, O. (2023) ‘Territorial healing: A spatial spiral weaving transformative reparation’, Planning Theory, 23(2). doi: 10.1177/1473095223118112.

Chairs/Moderators

Sobia Kaker (University of Essex, UK)
Ayesha Shahid (York University, Canada)

Round table participants

Redento Recio (University of the Philippines Diliman, Phillipines)
Saba Aslam (University of Cambridge, UK)
Manuel Bayón Jiménez (El Colegio de México, Mexico)
Kanupriya Dhingra (BML Munjal University, India)
Elya Milner (Technische Universität Berlin)

Description

This roundtable invites critical reflection on the challenges, strategies, and possibilities of scholar–activist collaborations in contexts where inequality is entrenched and state receptivity to pro-poor interventions is limited. Framed within the conference theme “Inequalities and the City: Old Issues, New Challenges”, the session situates itself in long-standing debates on the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1968; Harvey, 2012), urban social movements (Holston, 2009; Nicholls, 2008), and the expanding repertoire of innovative methodologies used to understand and contest dispossession, displacement, and disenfranchisement (Simone, 2018; Roy and Rolnik, 2020; Harb, 2021). As global academic attention to urban challenges grows—often shaped by funding priorities and institutional pressures—how can scholars working in or on Global South cities, particularly those outside the framework of ‘urban labs,’ confront and respond to the unique challenges of conducting engaged, activist, and policy-relevant research in these contexts? Governments may be hostile to critical scholarship, and activist groups can find themselves surveilled, delegitimised, or excluded from official policy conversations.

Against this backdrop, the roundtable asks: what does it mean to “make impact” when there is no receptive platform for research–activist collaborations to land? What counts as success when possibilities for pro-social and pro-poor policy engagement are increasingly constrained? The discussion will address the following interlinked questions:

  1. How can research move beyond publications to mobilise social justice and collective action beyond affected (and often exhausted) participant communities?
  2. How can scholarly work that seeks to resist evictions, dispossessions, and expulsions best navigate the tension between engaging with bureaucracies that often sustain the status quo and aligning with progressive political movements that are still emerging or fragile?
  3. Where should research “land” to produce meaningful effects in policy and practice? What metrics of success make sense in contexts where state power is increasingly exclusionary and resistant to progressive agendas?
  4. Where should we best situate scholarly that resists evictions, dispossessions and expulsions. between appealing to status-quo maintaining bureaucracies and (often fledgling) progressive political movements?

We particularly seek contributions from scholars working in Global South contexts who have grappled with these tensions in their own work. Participants are invited to explore advocacy after publication, the afterlives of research in activist campaigns, and/or reflections on failure as a form of knowledge production. We are keen to foreground the experiences of early career colleagues and those whose work, campaigns, or collaborations remain under-recognised, to enable a candid conversation about frustrations, learnings, and solidarities. By bringing together diverse perspectives, this roundtable aims to deepen conversations about urban inequalities while pushing methodological and political imaginations. It will foreground activist collaborations not as ancillary to scholarship, but as central to rethinking what it means to claim the right to the city under conditions of austerity, authoritarianism, and ecological precarity.

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