Seminar Three: University College London, London, UK
Wednesday 1st July to Thursday 2nd July
This third event in the seminar series will be the culmination of the discussions held in Benin and Tallinn. In Tallinn, we had a session which felt very exploratory, opening conversations across shared historical experiences, exploring the potential for thinking regions through connections with elsewhere, and understanding urban politics in contexts of bypassing, extraversion and institutional uncertainty, with a powerful role for central government. After a fruitful discussion there, with many analytical resonances, the Benin seminar focused on how understandings of African contexts might be framed in comparative perspective, especially through tracing connections but also building insights from distinctive places. In the final seminar, we draw together the papers and presenters from these two events in a hybrid format. The focus will be on a few new papers and presenters, with much of the time set aside for panel discussions, expanding the conversation on the emerging themes across the developing papers. The goal is to probe specific areas where engagement across the two regions offers fertile scope for informing the papers and potential publications. The panels will be framed around methodologies for decentering comparisons (connections; conversations) and consolidating insights on urban development politics and stateness, thinking with and across these two contexts.
The seminar will start with a keynote presentation by Łukasz Stanek, based on his extensive research on post-independence and ongoing connections in relation to architecture and planning between the post-socialist Eastern Bloc and African contexts. He develops decolonial perspectives and narratives that look beyond dominant structures and focus on the agency and exchange of knowledge/experience between places beyond the usual focus on global capitalism. Following an opening panel on experimental cross-regional comparisons, two streams of panel discussions and presentations will use a methodological framing to consider (a) how connections between and across the two regions can help to build new analytical insights; and (b) how opening generative conversations about key themes in each region can thicken conceptualisation.
Programme
Abstracts
Presentations
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