The Sheffield School was launched in September 2020. It was conceived as a way to systematically explore the critical issues embodied by the Urban Institute’s Signature Program, The Politics of Inhabitation and the Urban Technical.

It consisted of five working collectives, composed primarily of early career scholars. Initially the way of working was explicitly designed for pandemic conditions.

On-line, regular gatherings across dispersed geographies, time zones. Each collective was convened under a broad theme, reflecting common interests, problematics, and amenable to being shaped and addressed collaboratively. Each theme was elaborated to resonate with the Urban institute’s “signature” program, focusing on the relationships among technicities and a politics of inhabitation. Here, the “technical” is drawn large to encompass various registers and instruments for instigating, engendering, catalyzing, and curating processes of composition, of bringing disparate elements together as ensembles of action. Thus the collectives all attempted to embody this very notion of technicity and compose generative ways of being and acting together.

Themes included: urban popular economy, massive urbanization, urban re-arrangements, urban re-arrangements Asia, and urban life at the extensions.

Each collective was initiated without any objective other than a process of mutual exploration and support. Only during the process of working together did each collective decide to generate a collective publication reflecting its endeavors. These have appeared in Public Culture, the Geographical Journal, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Dialogues in Human Geography, and Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers.

These publications have demonstrated the salience and power of collective publication. Not as a means of consolidating a position or establishing a field. Rather manifesting a commitment to thinking something besides the normative theoretical rubrics, a kind of heuristic accompaniment. Methodologically the collectives have attempted to perform as improvising ensembles concerned with the musicality of the texts.

The Urban Institute wants to celebrate all of these efforts, to reintroduce collectives to each other, and talk about plans for the future.

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