'Emergency' Research Students' Roundtable

As part of the launch of UCL Urban Laboratory's 2020/21 annual theme 'Emergency' in collaboration with the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, we invite you to take part in our Postgraduate Student Roundtable on Thursday 17th December, 2 - 4PM. 

From COVID-19 to the climate emergency, or the fallout from financial crises to authoritarian governance, we are asking: what are the characteristics and consequences of ‘emergency urbanism’ in its different forms?

Students will be presenting their areas of interest, followed by Q+A and an interactive discussion facilitated by Dr Ellie Cosgrave, co-director of UCL Urban Laboratory, and joined by the Director, Dr Clare Melhuish.

What relations of call and response – of voicing, listening and attending – do urban emergencies put into play? How have emergencies (real and imagined) historically defined and reconfigured urban societies? What are the particular urban sites and spaces through which emergencies are governed, administered, framed and represented? Does emergency have a colour? Is it whitewashed? What if emergency is not an interruption but a state of being, a permanent productive one? How do we refocus emergencies as a human issue rather than a technocratic or environmental one?

The aim of this year’s Urban Lab/IRDR annual theme then is to explore the characteristics and consequences of ‘emergency urbanism’ in its different forms, and in relation to the underlying structural causes of the planetary emergency. When does a momentary crisis become an emergency, and what happens next?