Urban Salon: Living Through Uncertain Times

Across the world, cities are facing crisis on multiple fronts, putting the conditions for everyday life under tremendous pressure. Urban inhabitants are forced to reckon with abstract processes of change in part by establishing informal networks of care and social infrastructures of support.

This Urban Salon seminar, organised in collaboration with the QMUL City Centre, explores the emergence of such improvisatory practices, networks, collectives and gatherings, followed by an open discussion on the theme of living through uncertain times.

Speakers

• Michele Lancione (Recentering the politics of home. Notes from within and from below) is an urban ethnographer and activist interested in issues of marginality, diversity, and radical politics. His most recent writing has focused on homelessness, racialised displacement and underground life in Bucharest, Romania. Michele is member of the Common Front for the Right to Housing (FCDL), and corecipient of two Antipode Awards. He is also one of the founders and Editors of the open-source Radical Housing Journal (RHJ), an Editor of City, and Corresponding Editor for Europe at IJURR. He is based at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, where he is commencing work on a 5-year European Research Council funded program on ‘Radical Housing’.
• Constance Smith (Nairobi in the making: precarious architecture, ‘world-class’ futures and urban belonging) is a UKRI Future Leader Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where her research focuses on the anthropology of architecture, time and urban change. Exploring shifting landscapes of buildings, planning and infrastructure, her work examines how urban materialities influence temporal engagements. She holds a PhD from UCL and an MA from Columbia University.