The 7th WITTROCK LECTURE -
Future Foreclosed: Urban Time and the Politics of Urban Incipience
The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion and a reception. See below.
Ash Amin
Emeritus 1931 Chair of Geography, University of Cambridge
What are the foreshadows of urban time, the remainders that subvert the intended? This is a question worth asking as the lives of majorities are increasingly put at risk by multiple hazards and moves by those in power to repossess the urban commons. There is a futurity of urban foreclosure and dispossession unfolding. Yet, following Agamben’s characterisation of the contemporary as untimely, as a nick in time between the already and yet to come, and given the history of cities as brecciations of all manner of debris and knowledge from the past seeping into the present, there may be other temporal tendencies lingering. In its abandonment, life in the foreshadows of makeshift relations and survivalist care in artisanal habitats may hold some promise, resting on the incipience of always necessary connecting and experimenting in foregoing. How to acknowledge this incipience without romance, to name the conditions of its announcement of another urban future?
ABOUT:
Ash Amin is Emeritus 1931 Chair of Geography at the University of Cambridge, and holds an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University. Previously twice a SCAS Fellow and Foreign Secretary of the British Academy, he is currently a trustee of the Nuffield Foundation. His latest books are After Nativism: Belonging in an Age of Intolerance (Polity, 2023) and Grammars of the Urban Ground (coedited with Michele Lancione, Duke, 2022). With five other fellows of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s programme Humanity’s Urban Future, he is working on a book on Urban Foreclosure and its Foreshadows.
PANEL DISCUSSION -
Futuring Urban Lives: Foreclosures, Openings, and Contestations
Ash Amin, Ayse Caglar, Jennifer Mack & Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus
Moderator: Anders Ekström
This discussion examines the complex dynamics of urban life in the future, focusing on processes of foreclosures, openings and contestations in cities. The panel invites discussions on how future urban landscapes are both limited and shaped by the forces that drive and oppose development. What are the structural barriers that create exclusion and inequality in urban environments, and how are these phenomena exacerbated by political decisions and economic structures? What possibilities and openings can arise through collective resistance,
innovation-driven initiatives and alternative urban planning methods? And what contestations arise when the city’s inhabitants and actors challenge prevailing power structures and seek to create more just and sustainable urban futures? The discussion offers a critical reflection on how the cities of the future may develop and the possible paths that exist to counteract exclusion and create more inclusive urban societies.
Panellists:
Ash Amin
Ash Amin is Emeritus 1931 Chair of Geography at the University of Cambridge, and holds an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University. Previously twice a scas Fellow and Foreign Secretary of the British Academy, he is currently a trustee of the Nuffield Foundation. His latest books are After Nativism: Belonging in an Age of Intolerance (Polity, 2023) and Grammars of the Urban Ground (coedited with Michele Lancione, Duke, 2022). With five other fellows of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s programme Humanity’s Urban Future, he is working on a book on Urban Foreclosure and its Foreshadows.
Ayse Caglar
Ayse Caglar is University Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, and Permanent Fellow at IWM Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. Her work and publications focus on the interfaces of migration, urban restructuring, dispossession, displacement, confined labor, extractivism, and transformations of statehood and the governance of cities. She is currently a Fellow at SCAS.
Jennifer Mack
Jennifer Mack is Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at SCAS, and Associate Professor of Theory and History of Architecture at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Broadly, her work links history, anthropology, and the environmental humanities to investigate the built environment, with projects currently focused on toxicity, populism, climate change, and uncertainty in relation to landscapes and housing.
Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus
Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Newcastle University. She is a scholar of the 19th and 20th century French and Francophone worlds, with particular research interests in colonial and postcolonial history and theory, intellectual and legal history, and the afterlives of empire. Her work spans French history, Middle Eastern studies, global history, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies. She is currently a Fellow at SCAS.
Moderator:
Anders Ekström
Anders Ekström is Professor of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, and currently a Research Director at SCAS.
The lecture and the panel discussion will be followed by a reception.
Programme:
13:15 - 15:00 The 7th Wittrock Lecture
15:00 - 15:30 Coffee/tea break
15:30 - 17:00 Panel Discussion
17:00 - 18:00 Reception
Hybrid event.
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/61718666200
External link, opens in new window.
Pre-registration is required for the physical event by 14 March 2025 at the latest. The number of seats is limited and seats will be distributed on a first come, first served basis.
Event information
- Date:
- Time:
- to
- Location:
- The Thunberg Lecture Hall & Zoom Webinar