Headline: IASS Initiates Critical Dialogues Series on Sustainable Urbanisation

The IASS is initiating and facilitating a Series of Critical Dialogues on the practicalities of implementing the new urban agenda – and its possible constraints – in the political context of Habitat III, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development to take place in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2016. Each of these public dialogues addresses a topic of central importance to Habitat III from an unconventional angle and an ‘on the ground’ perspective.

Dialogue.01: ‘Overriding the Urban/Non-Urban Divide’

This first dialogue on the topic ‘Overriding the Urban/Non-Urban Divide’ takes an unconventional angle by addressing new approaches that transcend the discussion of the alleged “urban age” we live in and break with the idea of the bounded city in which the urban and the non-urban are opposed and spaces are classified, according to their form, on the urban-rural continuum. What if, as Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s critical urban theory on planetary urbanisation suggests, the putative non-urban is internalised in the theory of urbanisation and we no longer talk about form but about processes of concentrated and extended urbanisation? What does this shift mean when we address resource flows, food security and inequality issues? The practical perspectives from Chennai, Bogota and Jakarta ground the debate in reality and form the basis of a critical discussion on the ‘New Urban Agenda’ and its ‘Urban-Rural Linkages’.

The event is introduced by Katleen De Flander (IASS) and framed and moderated by Dr Pieter de Vries, Senior lecturer and researcher, Chairgroup of Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University.

Keynotes:

  • Dr Pushpa Arabindoo, Lecturer in geography and urban design, University College London; co-director UCL Urban Laboratory; editor (CITY Journal, Geography): Provincialising planetary urbanisation: situating Chennai between its region and the global
  • Carolina Chica Builes, Director of regional, national and international integration - Secretariat of Planning, Bogotá: Special Administrative Planning Region - Central Region. A case of new territorial arrangements that seek to overcome the urban-rural dichotomy
  • Prof. Dr AbdouMaliq Simone, Research professor, Max Planck Institute for Social and Ethnic Diversity and visiting professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London: When does the urban come, does it go, or does it simply change course and form, all of the time?  Reflections from Jakarta

Time and place:

  • Monday, 20 April 2015, 2–6 p.m.

The event will be conducted in English.

Admission is free upon registration at http://iass-potsdam.de/dialogues

More information:

Dialogue.02: Different urbanisations

The second Critical Dialogue will take place on 18 September 2015 in Berlin on the topic ‘Different Urbanisations’.

Africa is at the beginning of a major wave of urbanisation and is theoretically still in the position to take decisions on how the African Urban Transition will take shape. But what happens when we export European or Asian urbanisation patterns and technologies to African cities (which is already happening)? In other words, what are the roles and limits of knowledge and technology import/export between different regions of the world? This dialogue thus focuses on how ‘culturally different’ the processes of urbanisation are (or should be). Which approaches can be shared (imported) and which not? What influence do ‘different urbanisations’ have on the resulting urban resource flows? In which way could this inform the Habitat III debate? 

More information on this and the following dialogues will be available in due time.