How Does Planning Target Some and Protect Others?

Most narratives exploring the links between violence and urban development planning highlight the notion of ‘community resilience’ as shield to the worst impacts of acute stressors on inhabitants. Yet this framing often disguises biases regarding who is deemed resilient, who deserves protection. In this session we examine how urban violence and / or through planning is often insidious and slow, hard to see, count and name.  

The event will be chaired by: Professor Colin Marx

Speakers: 

Dr Rita Lambert:  

Systemic violence in migration governance: The (re)production of sacrifice zones in fragile ecosystems. 

Focusing on EU migration policies and practices, this presentation argues that environmental violence is also part of biopolitical mechanisms that create and maintain sacrifice zones- that is, territories of least resistance where migrants, locals and ‘nature’ are made expendable. It shows how integrating ecological perspectives into migration studies enriches theoretical frameworks and informs empirical research, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted dynamics at play in contemporary migration and bordering.   

Dr Rita Lambert is Associate Professor at UCL’s Bartlett Development Planning Unit. Her research, rooted in feminist political ecology and environmental justice, focuses on life-sustaining systems, such as land, housing, energy, water and food, and transforming urban processes that create vulnerability for people and ecosystems, particularly in the Global South. 

Prof Margaret Hillenbrand 

The Logic of Expulsion in Contemporary China 

On the evening of November 18th, 2017, a blaze broke out in a two-storey building in Xinjian urban village, located just outside Beijing’s Sixth Ring Road. At least 19 people, including 8 children, died in the flames. Yet in the days that followed locals had no chance to mourn. Before the fire had even been put out, the local authorities had issued a comprehensive eviction order for Xinjian, and as many 250,000 residents were forced to evacuate their homes. In this talk, I suggest that these evictions provoke questions about the limits of inequality, exclusion, and insecure work as meaningful descriptors of social conditions in our times. Instead, I explore the logic of expulsion in contemporary China, its capacity to foment both solidarity and social strife, and its relationship with cultural forms. In particular, I look at how people living under precarity in China today use culture as a space to vent feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain that are taboo under the diktats of so-called positive and harmonious society.  

Bio  

Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford. Her books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020), and On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023), which was awarded the Modern Languages Association’s Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies in 2024.