Economic Geography Network Seminar Series 2024-25

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Established in February 2023, the Economic Geography Network brings together academics and PhD students across UCL researching broadly in the field of Economic Geography or other related disciplines bringing economics into conversation with the urban, and geography. The cross-disciplinary network comprises quantitative and qualitative researchers including urban economists, human, urban and feminist geographers, planners, architects, urban sociologists, applied mathematicians, spatial data scientists and statistical physicists. Members of the network are based across a range of UCL Schools and Departments including the School of Geography, Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP), The Bartlett Schools of Planning, Architecture and Sustainable Construction, the Development Planning Unit and the Urban Lab, as well as Bartlett Centres and Institutes including the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), Institute of Global Prosperity (IGP), Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), and Bartlett Real Estate Institute (BREI).

Over the academic year, the network is hosting a series of internal seminars in the CASA seminar room. The informal seminars include presentations of recently completed work, work in progress and emerging research ideas. 

Organised by Jess Ferm, Max Nathan, Lin-Fang Hsu and Amy Horton. 

Seminar Schedule

09 December 2024 | 17:00 | Deivi Norberg

Lessons from organising small businesses in East London: a four-year ethnographic study 

This talk examines the lessons learned from four years of ethnographic research on the community organising efforts of small businesses in East London. Based on my collaborative doctoral research with the East End Trades Guild, I will explore how small business owners have come together to resist rising commercial rents and displacement pressures, using community organising to challenge growth-dependant urban planning. Through case studies of campaigns, from anti-eviction efforts to collective advocacy for affordable rents, I will highlight how community organising has enabled these businesses to build power, influence decision-making, and push back against extractive commercial landlords. The talk will reflect on the opportunities and challenges of sustaining collective action and fostering solidarity in a diverse business community, offering broader insights into the role of community organising in addressing urban economic inequalities.

Deivi Norberg (UCL/QML) will be sharing her recently completed PhD research. 

Open to all. 

13 January 2025 | 17:00 | Zulfikar Putra 

The Development of Grassroots Simulation as a Support System for Action-Centred City Planning

Cities are becoming more complex because of urbanisation, aggravated by issues like climate change. Apart from the top-down government interventions, grassroots actors take part in addressing emerging urban issues as a result of the lack of government interventions. However, because of their small scale, sudden emergence, and non-government nature, not all of them can consistently survive and continue to contribute to cities. So far, their emergence and development are organic without any consideration of locational factors that could make them survive longer. There is a lack of a tool to detect the location suitability to implement the initiatives considering their survivability and location characteristics. 

This study aims to formulate a grassroots simulation model by investigating the survivability factors and neighbourhood characteristics of waste bank initiatives in Yogyakarta City, Indonesia.  A mixed-method approach is utilised and is analysed using an epidemiological approach, which is combined with thematic analysis. It reveals that neighbourhood characteristics have a more significant impact on survivability than the initiatives themselves, suggesting the importance of being in a suitable location to implement such initiatives. The key factors include the existence of help each other culture, the prevalence of local community figures, the number of other D-I-Y projects, and clusters of like-minded people. Time also plays a role in determining the project’s survival, such as sudden events (e.g. the COVID-19 pandemic) and the introduction of new government policies. These factors are then translated into an index, indicator, parameter, and scoring rule for developing an online simulation dashboard to provide a tailored planning support system (PSS) for decision-makers to help detect suitable locations for a longer-lived grassroots initiative implementation in an urban neighbourhood scale. It can be accessed via this link: https://zulfikarputra.shinyapps.io/ComSim. 

The overall argument of this study is that grassroots simulation as a PSS can be tailored to detect the suitability of grassroots initiative location implementation based on the survivability factors and characteristics of the neighbourhood area. It contributes to the underexplored theoretical debates on the intersection between grassroots-based PSS, (community) action planning, urban governance, and grassroots urbanism, which could act as an alternative approach to addressing contemporary and future urban problems.

Zulfikar Putra is a PhD student at The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis,UCL, and a lecturer in the Urban and Regional Planning program at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. His research interests are related to planning support systems, spatiotemporal analysis, community planning, people-centred smart cities, co-creation processes, urban innovation, online platforms, and climate action.

Open to all. 

More Information:

• Study at The UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis 

Image: A result of the grassroots simulation showing neighbourhood suitability to initiate a grassroots initiative, using the case of the waste banks in Yogyakarta City, Indonesia.