Episodes
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Roberto Rocco and Hugo Lopez interview Titus Kaloki on addressing spatial justice through inclusive urban planning. The episode has three main topics: (1) Smart City vs Just City, (2) The idea of transformative change-making, and (3) the work for a socially just public transport.
Titus Kaloki is Programme Coordinator at FES _the Friedrich Ebert Stitftung for Social Democracy_ Kenya Office, where he leads the Just City programme, which engages the concept of a social and inclusive just city to facilitate innovative discussions among political decision makers, civil society representatives and others on issues such as affordable housing, fair and clean public transport, and meaningful civic engagement in urban spaces.
FES is the oldest political foundation in Germany with a rich tradition in social democracy dating back to its birth in 1925. The foundation owes its formation and its mission to the political legacy of its namesake Friedrich Ebert, the first democratically elected German President. The work of FES focuses on the core ideas and values of social democracy – freedom, justice and solidarity. FES is a non-profit institution that organises their work autonomously and independently.
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Today we have with us Stijn Oosterlynck speaking from Belgium. Stijn Oosterlynck is an Associate Professor in Urban Sociology at the University of Antwerp, Sociology department. He is the chair of the Centre for Research on Environmental and Social Change (CRESC, formerly OASeS) and the Antwerp Urban Studies Institute. He teaches courses on urban studies, poverty and social inequality. His research is concerned with local social innovation and welfare state restructuring, new forms of solidarity in diversity and urban diversity policies. He is also the academic director of the newly established Hannah Arendt institute. Hannah Arendt advocated active citizenship in which plurality, connection, critical thinking and open dialogue are central. This is not only at the heart of a strong democracy, but it is also an important goal of the work of the institute: to make everyone participate in the debate and in society.
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Today we have with us Efrat Cohen Bar, a representative of BIMKOM – Planners for Planning Rights, an Israeli non-profit organization working to strengthen democracy and human rights in the field of planning. Planning in Israel has commonly been used as a tool to oppress Palestinians and strip them of their rights. BIMKOM uses Israeli law to combat this. https://bimkom.org/eng/
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Today we have with us Suraj Yengde speaking to us from the United States. Suraj is a Shorenstein Centre inaugural post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy. He’s the author of Caste Matters. In this explosive book, Suraj, who is a first-generation Dalit scholar educated across continents, challenges deep-seated beliefs about caste and unpacks its many layers.
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Today we have with us Leilani Farha, speaking to us from Canada. Leilani was UN special rapporteur for the right to housing and is now director of SHIFT, a large NGO based in Canada that fights for and promotes the right to dignified housing. Leilani will talk more about the SHIFT, but it is important to highlight their philosophy. In their own words: “THE SHIFT recognizes housing as a human right, not a commodity or an extractive industry. The Shift restores the understanding of housing as home, challenging the ways financial actors undermine the right to housing. Using a human rights framework, The Shift provokes action to end homelessness, unaffordability, and evictions globally”. https://www.make-the-shift.org
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This session addresses the concept of governance and how planners and designers can use the concept to plan better, more inclusive cities. Frequently, in discussions about urban development and urban planning, you’ll hear the word “governance.” You will probably wonder what “governance” is and how it is different from “government.” The “government” is an imprecise shortcut we use to refer to the public sector, or the ensemble of levels and branches of government with all their departments, divisions, authorities, and so on. Countries and cities have governments, but the way they are “governed” includes much more than formal governments. “In empirical terms, governance refers to a shift in public organization since the 1980s. The world of government has changed. Increasingly governments rely on private and voluntary sector actors to manage and deliver services. The State enters contracts with other organizations, for example, to manage prisons and to provide training to the unemployed. The state forms partnerships with other organizations, for example, to build roads and rail lines and to deliver humanitarian aid. Whereas the government had consisted in no small measure of bureaucratic hierarchies, the new governance gives greater scope to markets and networks.” Bevir (2012)
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The primary purpose of this session is to teach future data scientists to look beyond the technical power of artificial intelligence and recognise the possibilities and limitations of data and the spatial inequalities that galvanise as a result of data-driven technology and policy. This session will engage students at the intersection of data science, urbanisation, and effective communication. By interrogating the sociotechnical nature of urban problems, students should then be able to approach solutions to these problems in ways that prioritise social equity and justice. In the last decade, technological advancements have led us to embed large-scale networked systems, sensors, and computers into the built environment. Urban data has emerged as an excellent stream of constant, real-time, and accurate information about all urban activities. The big data revolution, coupled with the capacity of infrastructure to be “smart” has enticed cities and urban managers worldwide to participate in machine learning-based decision-making for improving the course of humanity. But city planning has largely been instituted around loosely coupled organisations within municipal and regional governments, project developers, companies and investors, transport, water, and energy operators. While some communities have enjoyed the benefits of policies based on the use of big data, machine learning and AI, many have also suffered disproportionately by being pushed to the physical and technological periphery of rapid development in cities. As data scientists, and especially as engineering and policy analysts, it is our responsibility to interrogate the quality of data, the design of intelligent systems and their impact on communities.
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In this lecture, José and Carissa introduce socio-technical resilience, conceptualising urban resilience from a critical perspective. There are many conceptions of resilience, but the speakers draw on the concept as used in ecology, as resilience is a characteristic of complex systems. Resilience has become a very influential concept in urban adaptation to climate change, but there are problems with the concept, especially in relation to alignment to sustainability and justice (distributive, procedural and intergenerational).
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This session gives a definition of spatial justice and explores the notion of the commons as a tool to understand distributive, procedural, and intergenerational justice. Social Justice is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges of our times, as rampant inequality erodes the fabric of our societies everywhere, undermining trust in governments, leading to violence and extremism and eating at the very core of democracy. Growing inequality, socio-spatial fragmentation and lack of access to public goods are threats to the sustainability of our cities, especially when we consider sustainability in its three fundamental dimensions (social, economic and environmental). But when discussing how social justice takes place in urban spaces, we use the term SPATIAL JUSTICE, because it allows us to focus on the spatial dimension of the distribution of the burdens and benefits of urban development, and on the manner this distribution is managed. This management happens through formal institutions, such as planning systems, but also through informal institutions and practices, such as informal agreements and cultural attitudes towards urban space. Spatial Justice is a relatively new concept that focuses on mainly two ‘types’ of justice: distributive justice and procedural justice. On one hand, distributive justice is sought through the creation, fair allocation of and access to public goods, resources, and services throughout the city.
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At this episode we have Professor Mariana Fix from the School of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Sao Paulo. Mariana talks to us about the "Commodification & Financialization of the City". Mariana Fix is the author of the books “Partners in Exclusion” (Parceiros da exclusão) and “São Paulo, Global City” (São Paulo, Cidade Global), both published in Brazil. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Campinas, a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of São Paulo and she is also an architect. She was IIAS Re-Theorizing Housing as Architecture Research Fellow and was a visiting research scholar at CUNY’s Graduate Centre as an Urban Studies Foundation fellow. She is a member of the Housing and Human Settlements Laboratory at FAU-USP, and has been working with Right to the City movements for several years.
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At this episode, we have Professor Romola Sanyal from the London School of Economics, who will talk about “Migration and diversity in the city”. Professor Sanyal’s research focuses on the relationship between forced migration and urbanisation. In one strand of her research, she looks at how refugees and other forced migrants become ‘city makers’ through building and inhabiting urban spaces. This work had been conducted in India and Lebanon, through the study of Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and Partition refugee colonies in Calcutta.
Here, she explores how the act of [building itself] was a form of politics and how it challenged efforts by humanitarian organisations and host governments to marginalise and depoliticize refugees. She continues this work by studying how refugees come to [inhabit and make homes] whilst being displaced and living in legally precarious circumstances. A second strand of this work looks at the geopolitics of humanitarian knowledge production, particularly on urban refugees. Without further ado, let’s listen to Professor Sanyal.
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At this episode we have Professor Mona Fawaz. She is a professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut. She recently co-founded the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut, a regional research centre invested in working towards more inclusive, just, and viable cities. Mona is also the director of the Social Justice and the City research program based at the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy at AUB. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University. She has served on numerous national, regional and international juries, including the Aga Khan awards in Two thousand nineteen. Mona’s research spans across urban history and historiography, social and spatial justice, informality and the law, land, housing, property and space, as well as planning practice, theory and pedagogy. Without further ado, let’s listen to Professor Mona Fawaz.
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In the first episode, Professor Faranak Miraftab will talk about “Insurgent Practices of Hope and Care for Humane Urbanism". She is a Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a focus on Community Development for Social Justice and Transnational Planning. Her scholarship is situated at the intersection of sociology, geography, planning, and feminist studies, using case study and ethnographic methodologies. Her research concerns social and institutional aspects of urban development and planning, that address basic human needs, including housing and urban infrastructure and the services that support them. She is particularly interested in the global and local development processes and contingencies involved in the formation of the city and citizens’ struggles for dignified livelihood — namely, how groups disadvantaged by class, gender, race, and ethnicity mobilise for resources such as shelter, basic infrastructure, and services and how institutional arrangements facilitate or frustrate provision and access to such vital urban resources. Professor Miraftab is the author of a number of seminal papers on insurgency, a concept that she explores in her lecture.
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In this episode, we hear the initiator and host of this podcast: Roberto Rocco. He is an Associate Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy at Bouwkunde. Roberto is trained as an architect and spatial planner with a master’s in planning by the University of São Paulo and a PhD by TU Delft. Roberto specialises in governance for the built environment and social sustainability, as well as issues of governance in regional planning and design. This includes issues of spatial justice as a crucial dimension of sustainability transitions.
He has also published extensively about informal urbanisation in the Global South and he does research on how informal institutions influence and shape planning at the local level. He is a consultant for the Union for the Mediterranean and has recently drafted the UfM Action Plan for Sustainable Urbanisation 2040.
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