Racial capitalism and the urban: Setting the scene

Racial capitalism and the urban event series

City-making is a by-product of racial capitalism. Urban space has been shaped through racialised regimes of land, labour, property, and governance, yet the spatial consequences of racialisation remain unevenly addressed across urban research, practice, and institutional life. Racial capitalism offers a lens for understanding how these dynamics are produced and sustained, linking urban land and housing markets, labour regimes, infrastructures, governance, and everyday urban life to longer histories of colonialism, slavery, and imperial extraction. The present moment is marked by accelerated financialisation, securitisation, and ecological crisis, reshaping urban futures in ways that intensify existing forms of spatial violence and inequality. This series approaches the urban as a terrain where racialised processes of accumulation and dispossession take material form, and where practices of resistance, repair, and alternative urban imaginaries are actively unfolding.

This event marks the launch of a new public event series, Racial capitalism and the urban, which is a collaboration between the UCL Urban Laboratory cross-faculty collective, UCL Social & Historical Sciences and the Bartlett School of Architecture Just Environments Cluster. We envisage the series as dialogic and experimental, combining invited speakers with internal contributors, and encouraging different formats (theoretical interventions, empirical work, pedagogical reflections, and practice-based insights). 

About the event

This event, in collaboration with the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, opens a new series exploring how racial capitalism shapes urban futures and the struggles that seek to transform them.

Urbanisation has long been entangled with racialised regimes of land, labour, property, and governance. The framework of racial capitalism offers a way of understanding how these relations are historically produced and spatially organised, linking contemporary urban processes to longer histories of colonialism, slavery, and imperial extraction (Robinson 2000; Kelley 2017). Racial Capitalism foregrounds how racial differentiation has been constitutive of capitalist accumulation and the organisation of social and spatial life.

Recent debates have also asked how racial capitalism helps us understand the current conjuncture, a moment marked by intensified financialisation, ecological crisis, securitisation, and geopolitical restructuring. Scholars have argued that racial capitalism should be understood not only as a historical formation but also as a set of processes through which capitalist crises are managed through racialised differentiation and disposability (Matlon 2024; Bhattacharyya 2026). Cities provide a crucial site for examining these dynamics. Urban space is where processes of accumulation, dispossession, and differentiation become materially organised through land markets, housing systems, infrastructures, borders, and regimes of governance. At the same time, cities are also spaces where practices of survival, repair, and alternative forms of collective life continue to emerge.

This session brings together Jovan Scott Lewis, Mpho Matsipa, and Kamna Patel for a dialogue reflecting on what it means to think the city through the lens of racial capitalism today. Bringing perspectives across the United States, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, the discussion will also reflect on the role of whiteness and on how racial capitalism is thought and felt from, with, and through these different contexts. 

The conversation will be organised around four guiding questions:

1. What vocabularies and analytical tools are needed to think about the city and the urban through racial capitalism in the current historical conjuncture?

2. How might thinking racial capitalism as a catastrophe or world-ending structure reshape how we understand spatial violence in contemporary urban contexts?

3. What does it mean to consider how racial capitalism organises life  and specifically Black life through urban infrastructures, governance, and everyday practices?

4. What possibilities emerge when we turn toward questions of return, repair, and liberatory practices in the organisation of urban life?

References

Bhattacharyya, G. (2026) Afterword: Moving Beyond Racial Capitalism. South Atlantic Quarterly, 125(1): 171–178.

Kelley, R. D. G. (2017) What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism? Boston Review.

Matlon, J. (2024) Ten Theses of Racial Capitalism. Critical Sociology, 50(7–8): 1151–1166.

Robinson, C. (2000) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press.

Speakers

Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley and the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities. A critical human geographer and anthropologist, his research examines Black geographies, racial capitalism, reparations, and economic inequality across the Caribbean and the United States.

He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press, 2022), and co-editor of The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023). He served on the California Reparations Taskforce (2021–2023), an experience informing his forthcoming book State of Repair. Across his scholarship, Lewis examines how histories of slavery, colonialism, and racialised dispossession structure contemporary economic life while also foregrounding practices of restoration, repair, and alternative collective futures.

Mpho Matsipa is a South African educator, researcher, and independent curator.  Matsipa holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, pursued as a Fulbright Scholar. She has curated several exhibitions, discursive platforms and experimental architectural research including the Venice International Architecture Biennale (2008; 2021); African Mobilities at the Architecture Museum, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2018); and Studio-X Johannesburg, in South Africa (2014-2016).Her curatorial and research interests are at the intersection of urban studies, experimental architecture and visual art. Mpho was a Loeb Fellow 2022 (Harvard GSD), and an associate curator for the Lubumbashi Biennale, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2022). She has served on numerous design juries and international talks, and she has taught locally and internationally. Mpho is an Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Co-Director of Spatial Justice. She is working on a publication in collaboration with Chimurenga - African Mobilities – a Library of Circulations - for which she divides her time between Johannesburg, London, Lagos and New York. 

Kamna Patel is Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Development Planning Unit (DPU), UCL. Her research examines the relationships between race and development, bringing together work on housing, land tenure and citizenship in cities of the Global South, postcolonial and reflexive approaches to the teaching and practice of development, and the application of a race lens to advancing equity and justice. Her scholarship has explored the role of property regimes in awarding, denying, or contesting citizenship rights, including critical analyses of state-led low-income housing programmes and tenure security initiatives in cities of the Global South. Through this work she has examined how housing policies shape individual and community wellbeing, as well as how religious and ethnic identities intersect with claims to urban citizenship. Alongside this work, Kamna engages critically with the politics of knowledge in development practice, drawing on her professional experience as a consultant, project manager, and development practitioner to examine processes of “othering” in mainstream development policy and interventions. Her research also brings questions of race into debates on institutional change, equality, diversity, and inclusion in higher education and the development sector. Kamna’s forthcoming book Sustaining Development: British INGOs and Antiracism, offers a detailed portrait of the discursive entanglements of ‘race-talk’ in contemporary Britain within INGOs.

Chair

Catalina Ortiz is Professor of Critical Urban Pedagogy at UCL. She is a Colombian urbanist, educator, and scholar passionate about spatial justice. Catalina holds a BA in Architecture and a Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Studies from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and a PhD in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, completed as a Fulbright Scholar. Her work draws on decolonial and critical urban theory, using creative methodologies to study the politics of space production and foster more just cities and the recognition of multiple urban knowledges. Her research focuses on reparative urban praxis, critical urban pedagogies, planning for equality, and southern urbanisms. Her articles have been published in journals including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Planning Theory, Environment and Urbanization, Urban Studies, City, Cities, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She joined the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at University College London in 2015 and since 2024 has served as Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. Catalina is also Editor of the journal Urban Studies and chair of the Wards Corner Community Benefit Society. 

Image: Collage titled ‘The overlay of city-making perspectives’ by Catalina Ortiz.