Urban Salon hosts the book launch of: Urban Geopolitics: Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities

Moving away from loosely defined urban theories and contexts, this book argues it is time to start learning from and compare across different ‘contested cities’. It questions the long-standing Euro-centric academic knowledge production that is prevalent in urban studies and planning research. Urban Geopolitics: Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities: brings together a diverse range of international case studies from Latin America, South and South East Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East to offer an in-depth understanding of the worldwide contested nature of cities in a wide range of local contexts. It suggests an urban ontology that moves beyond the urban ‘West’ and ‘North’ as well as adding a comparative-relational understanding of the contested nature that ‘Southern’ cities are developing.

In this event the editors and some of the chapter authors will present the books overarching themes and engage with selected cities.

Program

Welcome and introduction

Jonathan Rokem and Camillo Boano (UCL) 

Book chapter presentations

The tale of ethno-political and spatial claims in a contested city: the Muhajir community in Karachi.
Sadaf Sultan Khan, Kayvan Karimi and Laura Vaughan. (UCL)

The Embodiment of the Ideology of ‘Development’ in the Practice of Marketplace Coordination in Jakarta
Pawda F Tjoa (Cambridge)

The Camp vs the Campus: Revisiting the contested landscapes of an urban Mediterranean encampment in Famagusta, Northern Cyprus
Moriel Ram (SOAS)

The Medellín's Shifting Geopolitics of Informality: The Encircled Garden as a Dispositive of Civil Disenfranchisement?
Catalina Ortiz and Camillo Boano (UCL)

Discussants

Prof. Matthew Gandy (Cambridge) 
Dr. Sara Fregonese (Birmingham)
Dr. Sobia Ahmad Kaker.(Goldsmiths) 

Q&A with audience

Followed by drinks reception

The event is co-sponsored by the UCL Development Planning Unit, UCL Urban Lab and the Urban Salon theurbansalon.org