Keynote at the Swiss School of Latin American Studies 2024 annual conference on Mapping Territories: Space, Place, and Environment in Latin America at the University of Bern, Switzerland, October 3-4, 2024.
Date: October 3-4, 2024
Location: University of Bern, Mittelstrasse 43, Room 220
How can we empirically grasp and map the spatiality of large urban territories? How can we learn from very different urban experiences? How can we enhance and differentiate our vocabulary of urbanization? These questions serve as starting points to discuss the book Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet: Theory Building through Comparison edited by Christian Schmid and Monika Streule. In this book, an interdisciplinary team of researchers present an expanded vocabulary of urbanisation processes through a comparison of Tokyo, Hong Kong – Shenzhen – Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City and Los Angeles. Based on a novel method of cartography and on detailed ethnographic and historical explorations, they systematically analyse the diversity of responses to urgent contemporary urban challenges. They propose a series of new concepts that allow us to assess the practical consequences of different urban strategies in everyday life. Together with special guests we invite for a critical reflection on comparative urbanism and a discussion of mapping as a crucial tool for the analysis of urbanisation processes.
Discussants are Philip Harrison, Pushpa Arabindoo, Juan Miguel Kanai, Hyun Shin and Catalina Ortiz. Panel organizers are Christian Schmid and Monika Streule.
Sponsered by the RGS Urban Geography Research Group.
Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet: Theory Building through Comparison (Birkhäuser, 2023) edited by Christian Schmid and Monika Streule. With contributions by Naomi Hanakata; Ozan Karaman; Anne Kockelkorn; Lindsay Sawyer; Christian Schmid; Monika Streule; Kit Ping Wong.
ISBN: 978-3-0356-2301-7
NEW: Open access! eBook available here
The Tula thermoelectric plant north of Mexico City is apparently burning high-sulphur fuel oil, contaminating the air of the Mezquital Valley, by Abisai Pérez Romero (2022)
Ghosts of bodies that inhabit urban natures. Territorial ruins left in the wake of socio-environmental disasters. Monstrous urban infrastructure megaprojects fed by toxic extractivism. Urban geography finds itself in times of crisis. How can researchers deal with cities experiencing multiple crises spanning from war and conflicts to debt and austerity as well as to climate change and loss of biodiversity? The anthology “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet” by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and others puts forward a bold proposal: to engage in entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions that offer urgent critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in critical times. The book posits that pursuing this methodology will also allow scholars to be touched by their research and, as a result, induced to consider and imagine new possibilities. In the same vein, it is crucial to ask: What kind of planetary futures can we imagine collectively? What futures are we living in the present, and on what past futures can we build?
Streule, Monika (2024) Ghosts, ruins, monsters: urban geography in times of crisis. Geographica Helvetica 79.3, 241–246. DOI: 10.5194/gh-79-241-2024
Paper on Relating urban extractivism and financialization in Mexico City’s peripheries. RC21 Conference 2024 in Santiago de Chile