Monika Streule

A socio-territorial approach as widely discussed by Latin America-based scholars and activists is a particularly apt lens to emphasis uneven power relations in the everyday production of urban space. Moreover, a socio-territorial approach implies a particular focus on social actors in the wide range of disputed processes of territorialization in urban contexts, specifically the stark controversies over large infrastructure projects we witness today. This approach furthermore contributes to a post- and decolonial agenda by critically reflecting on the conditions of knowledge production to decentralize and pluralize urban theory.

In my current project Decolonizing ecology: Contested urban territories in Mexico City and La Paz/El Alto, I examine such socio-territorial conflicts that have become central to cities of Latin America due to a range of specific conditions including the construction boom in urban infrastructure megaprojects, land reforms, and emerging urban social movements that call for a more responsible and accountable relationship with the urban natural environment. Through a systematic, comparative study of indigenous urban movements in the metropolitan areas of Mexico City, Mexico, and La Paz–El Alto, Bolivia, this research ethnographically theorizes social practices to generate and convey innovative concepts and methods. An article in Urban Geography discusses some of these findings. The research project is based at the London School of Economics Latin America and Caribbean Centre and awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, funded by the European Commission.

In our ongoing collaborative research, Anke Schwarz (TU Dresden) and I suggest to analyse subject formation through socio-territorial practices aiming to, for example, understand socio-spatial polarizations and the co-production of space and power. We recently published a paper on this in Progress of Human Geography. As part of this collaboration, we edited a special issue on contested urban territories: decolonized perspectives. Additionally, this innovative conceptual perspective contributes to better understand links between the rise of the Far Right in Europe and urban space as we focus on in the DFG funded scientific network Territorialization of the Far Right Terra-R. Moreover, this socio-territorial approach is useful in the thinking about borders and about border security regimes as focused in the cooperative transdisciplinary project Materialized Memories in/of the Landscape at the Zurich University of the Arts.

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).