Sheffield Urbanism Schools
Launched in September 2020, the Schools represent the Urban Institute’s commitment to: generating new theoretical frameworks for understanding urbanization processes; working collaboratively with partners across the world to develop new methodologies of research and engagement; developing new pedagogical instruments for knowledge production and conveyance and; a systematic response to the intellectual and political challenges occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic. Consisting of multiple collective working groups of various durations, organized around a series of cutting-edge themes, and primarily composed of early career researchers, the Schools consolidate the UI’s collective experience in social-technical systems, Black and decolonial urbanisms, metropolitan formations, climate justice, and co-constitutive governance in order to design pedagogical experiences to diffuse this knowledge, precipitate new research agendas, and build sustainable working relationships with urban institutions across the world.
The School consists of the following ongoing collectives:
1. Urban Popular Economies. Co-convened with the Consejo Latinamericano Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), this working group considers issues of urban social reproduction, livelihood, and urban formations through a multiplicity of ground-level practices operating simultaneously within and outside the prevailing logics of capital accumulation. Publications:
"Urban Popular Economy: Territories of Operation for Lives Deemed Worth Living." Public Culture 2023.
The Urban Glossary Project, Cityscapes
2. Re-tooling Mobilization and Advocacy in Contexts of Massive Urbanization. Comprised of researchers from Lagos, Johannesburg, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, Karachi, Delhi, Manila, Istanbul, and Jakarta, this working group considers modalities of urban politics and collective life in mega- urban regions of the Global South. The collective has developed a three-part article for the magazine of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and is preparing a special issue for the Geography Journal.
See: https://www.societyandspace.org/forums/massive-urbanization-forum
3. The continuous unsettlements of “estates” in Europe. Co-convened with the National Museum of Denmark, this collective explores the state of unsettlements as an entry point for thinking about the genericity of living in heterogenous urban spaces: the shifting material and social forms, the overlapping registers of financing, the syncopated histories, and the repurposing of resources, assets, and values The first international workshop was held on March 1-2, 2021, a research clearing house website has been established, as well as a series of research projects in Athens, Copenhagen, Naples, and Istanbul. See: https://www.therealestate.space/
4. Collectives on Urban Arrangements examines those constellations of collective enactment that cannot be sufficiently subsumed under the categories of household, institution, network or the processes of contractual obligation, governmental responsibility, or familial reciprocity. Three workshops were held during Spring 2021 for two distinct working groups of 12 early careers scholars each, one group for Europe and a second for Asia. Publications:
"On Urban Re-Arrangements: A Suite in Five Movements." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2023
"Formalizing Arrangements" "Navigating Urban Arrangements". "Breath, Sigh Tempest" "Sensing the Affective Lives of Re-arrangements
"Re-Arranging the Urban: Forms, rhythms, politics." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2023
Workshops on Maneuvers, Propositions, Struggles, Deceptions: making territories of operation in urbanities changed around. Co convened with Public Culture, two workshops were held in Spring 2021 with 12 early career researchers to consider the makings of
territories of operations outside or aside the residual colonization of urban life—its grids, computations, impositions, perspectives,
and apparatuses. The initial output is the publication of a series of articles in the following:
Urbanism Beyond the City. Public Culture 38, 3, 2023
Emerging Epicenters of Global Urbanization: Asia and Africa
(with the African Centre for Cities, the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, the Hyderabad Urban Lab and the Rujak Center for Urban Studies)
Tracks the key demographic, economic, socio-cultural variables driving massive urban growth in these two regions and, through grounded social action and ethnographic research, examining how heterogeneous processes of intensive and extensive urbanization are instantiated in select urban areas across these regions and, furthermore, with attention to the remaking of urban cores and peripheries.
Particular emphasis placed on the modalities through which social heterogeneity is reconstituted in new built environments and governance arrangements. First phase outcomes of the work, focusing methodologically on how everyday life and macrostructural changes can be considered simultaneously, elaborates how adaptive urban agendas—focusing on infrastructural change—can build cross-class, cross-sectoral coalitions capable of shaping urbanization processes across these regions in more sustainable and just ways.
Initial results are documented in Pieterse, Edgar and AbdouMaliq Simone (June 2017) New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times. London; New York: Polity
Urban Life at the Extensions: Processes of Unsettlement and Movement
A lateral comparison of "new" urban territories in Asia, mostly but not exclusively focused on the hinterlands of large urban regions. Extensions concern not only extended urbanization, but the ways in which urbanization processes extend themselves with and across various dispositions, bodies, materials, and practices to unsettle consolidations of inhabitation within any overarching framework. Where itineraries of circulation supercede emplacement. While dedicated genealogies may be capable of grasping how particular built environments, spatial dispositions and fabric got to be the way they manifest themselves, there is something that eludes coherent narratives of development and prospective futures. These are spaces of intensive contiguity of the disparate—disparate forms, functions, and ways of doing things. They are replete with gaps, interstices, breakdowns, contested territories, and sediments of dissonant tenure regimes, financing, legalities, and use. Instead of being able to discern legible articulations among the details of composition, the proliferation of housing, commercial, industrial, logistical, recreational, entrepreneurial, and governmental projects are less subsumed into overarching logics of capital accumulation or neoliberal rationalities as they are “strange accompaniments” to each other, where nothing quite fits according to design, where things dissipate or endure without obvious reason, and where improvised alliances of use and rule continuously reshape what it is possible for any particular individual or institutional actor to do.
Initial analytical discussion are in the forthcoming from Duke University Press: The Surrounds: urban life within and beyond capture.
New Forms of Collective Urban Life
Cities of the global south are experiencing substantial changes in forms of collective life. Old arrangements anchored in certain configurations of labor, housing, gender, politics, and uses of the city are being unmade. The new forms that are emerging in their place are unexpected, inspiring and disturbing in their attempts to manage both the seemingly intractable problems of metropolitan areas from high levels of inequality to the messiness of everyday life, as well as navigate significant economic, political and demographic changes. The project investigates these changes and the emergent politics and forms of collective life by engaging with the everyday of five cities: Delhi, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Yangon,and São Paulo, with colleagues Teresa Caldeira, Gautam Bhan, and Kelly Gillespie.
My work focuses largely on Jakarta and Yangon, examining the disentanglement of long-hone self-evolved districts and economies, the resettlement of larger swathes of the population within large-scale vertical housing complexes, and the concomitant remaking of collective action, conceptualizations of residence and urban life, as well as household units. Major findings so far point to a major transformation in how residents think about urban life, the valorization of circulation—through more expansive urban circuits and heterogeneous economic and social networks—and the prolific re-assembly of collective life under new, more provisional modalities that often diverge from the imaginaries suggested by the new built environments in which people increasingly reside.
The work explores different operational modalities and geographies of collectivity through the tropes of districts, spirals, peripheries, compressions, ensembles, eventualities, and extensions.
See: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-pandemic-southern-urbanisms-and-collective-life
Inhabiting Urban Corridors
As urbanization is no longer embodied by the city, it takes a multiplicity of spatial, physical and social forms. Much work has been done on the infrastructures, production networks and commodity circuits at work in the articulation of existent urban regions in the formation of corridors. This project undertakes a more socio-cultural exploration of the complexion of mobilities, labor, and social interchange at work in these corridors, using them as a site to understand the composition of new heterogeneities among materiality, everyday life, and built environments. A workshop of twenty-eight social scientists working on the relationship between culture, urbanization and infrastructure along the East African Indian Ocean coast was conducted in October 2016 to explore key theoretical and methodological issues that will be further investigated both in this region and in the emerging Kolkata-Kunming corridor (an element of the One Belt/One Road and Bangladesh, China, India, Myanmar (BCIM corridor projects), and the East-West Economic Corridor (Mawlamyine, Myanmar to Danang)
An initial key finding is that the social and relational landscapes that constituted a platform on which subsequent, large scale projects of articulation could be imagined and built become increasingly marginalized and unraveled as new economic interdependencies emerge, which in turn devalues important livelihoods, social histories as populations are subject to intensive dispersals. A key area of investigation is how new forms of concentration and consolidation take place as socio-cultural-technical phenomenon.
See: https://cityscapesmagazine.com/projects/the-corridor
Black Urbanism
An exploration of the ways in which the long, and by no means systematic history of black inhabitation of cities could be a critical method through which to engage urban life everywhere. This an urban life that is more than its multiple manifestations, that exceeds any definitive attempt to pin it down, and that yet remains something specific, and not simply a potential-making machine. How does this history open up new ways of engaging the very concrete efforts that constructed the city? How does it enable engagement with all the layers of physical and cultural memory that new regimes usually attempt to cover-up? How might it exhibit all that the city does not show, either because its inhabitants are prohibited from paying attention or because whatever is considered normative or spectacular in city life has to get rid of the messy labor and politics that brought it about?
