Monika Streule

My commitment to apply innovative research to problems of social and political importance has formed the goal of my academic activities and research practices. Building on my doctoral and postdoctoral work, I strive to contribute to theoretical and methodological considerations about rapid urban transformation in the context of pressing issues to find new ways to deal with global social and environmental challenges. Inspired particularly by feminist and post- and decolonial scholarship, I aim to critically revise parochial conceptualizations and engage in the development of a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives.

My book Ethnography of urban Territories (2018, Westfälisches Dampfboot) is a major output of my interdisciplinary approach and extensive fieldwork in Mexico City. The book provides insights into everyday forms of agency in urbanization and contributes to an understanding of the spatial dimension of society. The primary research presented is based on two main interests: on the one hand, a focus on understanding the predominant urbanization processes which have shaped the metropolitan territories of Mexico City in a historical as well as in a contemporary perspective. On the other hand, the scope of the research entailed developing and applying an interdisciplinary mixed set of methods to study urbanization processes empirically at large scale. In papers published in Urban Studies and FQS I discuss some of these findings.

Having extended field research experience, has turned positionality, self-reflexivity and ethnographic writing into key concepts of my research. My current research project Decolonizing ecology draws on my expertise in methods and methodologies of qualitative urban research, particularly on ethnography and cartography, and advances them with collaborative and dialogical approaches including mapping workshops and oral history interviews to co-produce urban knowledge and represent different practices together with indigenous urban communities and Latin America-based scholarship. Current ongoing academic collaborations include the Instituto de Investigaciones Socio-Económicas de la Universidad Católica Boliviana UCB, La Paz, and the Instituto de Geografía de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México UNAM, Ciudad de México.

My research builds on extensive experience in concept building through a comparative procedure in a broader research project Patterns and Pathways of Planetary Urbanization – including cases such as Mexico City, Lagos, Kolkata, Istanbul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Paris, Los Angeles – based at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory Singapore and the Chair of Sociology, Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich. The comparison, conducted between 2011 and 2017, is based on a collective, interdisciplinary and transductive research process applying a qualitative methodological design that combines a wide variety of sources and procedures.

In repeatedly bringing situated insights from these diverse contexts in conversation with each other right from the outset of the project, it was possible to develop about a dozen comparative concepts of urbanisation that captured a number of common features and dynamics. As such, this comparison emanates from collaborative work, where the members of the team brought their disciplinary backgrounds and empirical research into a shared methodological framework, while allowing the evolving comparison to inform their own research. Project team members in alphabetical order are Naomi Hanakata, Pascal Kallenberger, Ozan Karaman, Anne Kockelkorn, Lindsay Sawyer, Christian Schmid, Monika Streule and Kit Ping Wong.

We published a series of co-authored papers in Urban Studies, IJURR, Antipode, Environment and Planning A, Planning Perspectives, City and FQS with results of this project demonstrating a comparative approach on detailed and situated analysis of daily practices reaching beyond a specific case study, opening a conceptual space to collectively build an extended vocabulary to understand urbanization crucial for urban studies more broadly. Together with Christian Schmid, I co-edited the book Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet: Theory Building through Comparison (Birkhäuser 2023).