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Beatrice De Carli
(London Metropolitan University)
Ola Uduku
(Univesrity of Liverpool)
Catalina Ortiz
(UCL)
Format:
Workshop
Streams:
Urbanisation
Sessions:
Thursday 7 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Urban design from the global South/East: Imagining just futures.
Workshop W09 at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
The workshop explores the significance of critical design in the urban context, and interrogates its relevance for development studies and practice. To do so, the event facilitates a dialogue around the role of critical urban design ontologies, theories, and praxes in advancing justice in cities.
Long Abstract:
This workshop aims to create a space for dialogue around the role of critical urban design in advancing justice in cities.
In recent years, several voices have aimed to bring design closer to the question of justice. This 'difficult labour' - as Mareis and Paim (2021) put it - stems from the recognition that design is complicit in the structural systems of oppression that serve to reproduce power and privilege. Critical voices in this field are largely grounded in the global South/East - shaping an area of work that Escobar (2018) describes as the transnational field of critical design studies. This mobilises terms such as indigenous design, pluriversal design, and designing otherwise to highlight the possibility of re-conceiving design's entanglements with power not as tools of oppression, but as a force for social justice.
This workshop is concerned with the significance of this discourse in the urban context, and with its relevance for development studies and practice. The focus is set on the role of 'urban design' in shaping relationships of power in cities. With others, we adopt an expansive definition of urban design, as a collaborative critical and creative task of imagining future urban spaces. During the event, we will interrogate how critical urban design is being practiced and theorised in, through and from the global South/East, as a means for illustrating and putting into action more just urban futures. The workshop will foster discussion around three focus areas: design praxes and methodologies; theoretical perspectives; and epistemological and ontological positionings.
I'd like to share the early findings on my practice-orientated PhD through design that is focusing on the spatial design practices through a Southern Urbanist lens in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Why would you like to speak in this workshop?:
The persistent reality of gross and systemic inequality in South Africa can be seen most clearly seen in the built urban that continues to re-enforce post-colonial and post-Apartheid spatial city patterns. While South Africa's socio-economic inequality is a well-documented and hotly discussed topics of research and public debate; the socio-systemic nature of the country's spatial inequality remains a more elusive and collectively murky topic - particularly in regards to the inter-scalar and positional dimensions of practice within the spatial design disciplines and the city systems they work within.
This inter-personal and inter-scalar difficulty of engaging with the nature of spatial inequality is not limited to South Africa and the locationally sensitive work being done through Southern scholarship across the social sciences and humanities offers a situated means to theoretically house the doctoral study. The approach of the larger project is supported by the guiding principles and intentions of Southern Urbanism and is positioned at the disciplinary intersection of architecture, urban studies and arts-practice.
This contribution hopes to share the initial methodological findings of this project and contribute an additional perspective to the discussion on Southern Urban Design.
I investigate the phenomenon called 'urban informality' (both theoretical and physical dimensions) in Global South. Looking at cases of squatter/slum settlements and refugee displacements, I draw focus on their production rather than their presence, to confront urban tools and dynamics of power.
Why would you like to speak in this workshop?:
My research situates itself between the concerns of decolonial thinkers at large and Post-Development approaches towards knowledge production pertaining to urban practice and urban imaginaries. Where coloniality and development overlap, complex and nuanced power structures emerge. As seen in regions framed as developing/underdeveloped, a detrimental outcome of these power structures has been the predisposed sources of knowledge.
Following an emergent paradigm in theorizing development from Southern perspectives, I wish to discuss the urban manifestations of internalized colonization and power embedded within the dynamics of urban otherness and exclusion of, and in, the Post-Development Global South. Through studying the displaceability of informal settlements and refugee camps, I would like to questions the epistemics and construction of otherness and threat as a by-product of the colonial lens. I question the enigma of the informal as the unplanned and uncontrolled. This leads us to two interesting questions - is the informal unplanned because the invader, ruler or technocratic planner did not decide how it will be planned or is it un-plannable because the vocabulary of the dominant urban theory and logics of how to live the 'right' way does not explain this way of being?!
Higher education has been traditionally elitist in nature, an institutional domain that has assisted the process of social, economic, and political advancement of the elite in India. Exclusions and marginalities in higher education have been identified on the basis of social categories such as class, caste, gender, religion, region, ethnicity, and by a physical category of disability. This paper is based on ethnographic field work conducted in the state of Bihar, India. Due to landlessness and lack of other source of livelihood Higher education remains only means to bring social changes in the lives of dalit student in Bihar however students in higher education navigate not only through social, economic and cultural marginalisation but also urban marginalisation.
Why would you like to speak in this workshop?:
Higher education has been traditionally elitist in nature, an institutional domain that has assisted the process of social, economic, and political advancement of the elite in India. Exclusions and marginalities in higher education have been identified on the basis of social categories such as class, caste, gender, religion, region, ethnicity, and by a physical category of disability. However, these also have a spatial dimension—for example denial of access to spaces that further provide opportunities in social, economic, political, educational spheres. This paper attempts to understand this complex process of urban marginalization through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bihar, India. Due to landlessness and lack of other source of livelihood Higher education remains only means to bring social changes in the lives of dalit students however students in higher education navigate not only through their social, cultural and economic marginalisation but also urban marginalisation.
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Ola Uduku (Univesrity of Liverpool)
Catalina Ortiz (UCL)
Short Abstract:
The workshop explores the significance of critical design in the urban context, and interrogates its relevance for development studies and practice. To do so, the event facilitates a dialogue around the role of critical urban design ontologies, theories, and praxes in advancing justice in cities.
Long Abstract:
This workshop aims to create a space for dialogue around the role of critical urban design in advancing justice in cities.
In recent years, several voices have aimed to bring design closer to the question of justice. This 'difficult labour' - as Mareis and Paim (2021) put it - stems from the recognition that design is complicit in the structural systems of oppression that serve to reproduce power and privilege. Critical voices in this field are largely grounded in the global South/East - shaping an area of work that Escobar (2018) describes as the transnational field of critical design studies. This mobilises terms such as indigenous design, pluriversal design, and designing otherwise to highlight the possibility of re-conceiving design's entanglements with power not as tools of oppression, but as a force for social justice.
This workshop is concerned with the significance of this discourse in the urban context, and with its relevance for development studies and practice. The focus is set on the role of 'urban design' in shaping relationships of power in cities. With others, we adopt an expansive definition of urban design, as a collaborative critical and creative task of imagining future urban spaces. During the event, we will interrogate how critical urban design is being practiced and theorised in, through and from the global South/East, as a means for illustrating and putting into action more just urban futures. The workshop will foster discussion around three focus areas: design praxes and methodologies; theoretical perspectives; and epistemological and ontological positionings.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Thursday 7 July, 2022, -Jhono Bennett (University College London)
Aamina Shahid (Politecnico di Milano)
Amardeep Kumar (National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA))