The reflections are from the ‘Inequalities and the City: Old Issues, New Challenges’ Conference.
You can also listen to the latest Urban Radar episode for more vox pops from the conference: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2451716/episodes/19565769
Hugo Lopez
For me, RC21 was busy and fun – meeting people I knew only through their work, and discovering how much interesting research is being done across the world. I presented my early PhD work in panel #75, "Southern Indigenous Urban Praxis", hosted by Andres Ramirez and Philipp Horn. The first part of this panel gathered the Latin American contributions: what struck me was how every presentation unsettled a linear way of planning. Presenting a quilombola territoriality alongside these, we saw how the two might strengthen each other. Attending to different temporalities and spatialities makes planning look less like a discipline and more like a question of how people produce space on their own terms. We were left with the question: "What about planning now?" This question resonated with another session I co-hosted on "Collective Urban Praxis: Relational and Transformative Approaches to Challenging Urban Inequalities," with my friends at the TU Delft Centre for the Just City. It was a session to inquire into planning pedagogies and explore how collaborative and relational approaches to knowledge production can cultivate solidarity and recognition. We saw how we unsettle our own role, hoping to create the conditions for differences to reconcile, to discuss, to unlearn together what we think we know. Maybe that's our role in the contemporary, and where we can help stir planning action. Maybe both sessions were not far apart at all. I'd like to thank Sheffield University and the Urban Institute, as well as my colleagues at the TU Delft Centre for the Just City, for the conversations and the company.
Claire Pang
One of my goals in the second year of my PhD has been to attend more conferences, both as an audience and to present my work. As an international PhD student, these experiences have been different. At some conferences I quickly found myself in conversations that continued beyond the panels; at others I felt more like an outsider looking in. Reflecting on these experiences, I’ve started wondering what actually shapes our sense of academic community.
I’m beginning to think there are at least four overlapping dimensions:
- Field site: where our research is situated (for me, migrant newcomers in the U.S.);
- Intellectual community: the questions, methods, and disciplines we engage with;
- Institutional affiliation: the universities and colleagues that shape our everyday academic life;
- Personal positionality: language, nationality, and cultural background.
Different conferences seem to activate these dimensions differently. RC21, as a European conference centred on urban issues, made me feel particularly connected through both Sheffield Urbanism and the methodological community around participatory mapping and qualitative GIS. Equally important was the way the panel was organised: the convener intentionally created opportunities to connect before and after the session, making those conversations feel natural rather than forced.
Perhaps conferences are not gateways into a single academic community, but different configurations of overlapping communities, each bringing a different part of our academic identity into focus.
Monica Martin Grau
My first RC21 conference, in Athens in 2022, quickly dispelled my idea of what an academic conference would be. The conversations never seemed to stop, and I soon realised that keeping up with the conference social life would be almost as demanding as the academic programme. Returning to RC21 in Vienna this year, I experienced the same again: dozens of conversations unfolding simultaneously, making the biggest challenge deciding which sessions to attend. This situation reminded me why Urban Studies remains such an exciting field.
Unlike many conferences organised around a single discipline, RC21 feels like an open platform where geographers, planners, sociologists, anthropologists, architects and many others come together around a shared interest in cities. These conversations also reveal how the field is changing. Research from Africa, Latin America and Asia is now central to urban debates, yet scholars based in institutions in the Global South remain underrepresented. Unsurprisingly, discussions about who produces urban theory, and from where, continued long after the formal sessions had ended. Within this stimulating environment, I presented my paper, "Repair as city-making: Ethical know-how and urban water in Nairobi", in the panel "Reparative Urban Futures: New Urban Imperatives", organised by Catalina Ortiz (UCL) and Natalia Villamizar (Newcastle University). Drawing on my PhD research, I argued that not all everyday practices of repair are inherently reparative. Rather, repair becomes transformative when it cultivates what Francisco Varela calls ethical know-how: the capacity to recognise harm and extend existing relationships into new possibilities for more just urban futures. Fittingly, the panel brought together empirically grounded research from across the globe, illustrating how urban theory is shaped through dialogue across places, perspectives and experiences. The discussions and feedback received during the session have been very valuable for the development of these ideas into my next journal article.
Xinyu Jin
When I first heard of the RC21 Conference during my first year of my PhD, it felt like something that was a long way off. I really hoped that I would have the chance to attend it at least once during my PhD journey. I am very happy that I was able to attend the conference and present my work this year. As an international student, attending an international conference in another country is not always easy. From selecting a panel, submitting an abstract, preparing the conference paper and arranging the travel, there are many details that require attention. RC21 gave me a better understanding of what an academic conference is like and I was really looking forward to learning from the experience.
At the conference, it was great to learn about the wide range of themes and to see the topics that researchers from different countries and regions pay particular attention to. Even within the same panel or theme, different case studies explored similar issues from different perspectives. I also realized that a presentation could fit into different panels. In addition, I learned a lot from the different qualitative methods used by other researchers. The theme of the panel where I presented was heritage and regeneration. I was pleased to find from the presentations and discussions that many countries around the world face similar dilemmas and, although in different contexts, adopt similar approaches. The conversations in different panels and workshops also reminded me of the importance of informality in understanding urban regeneration and everyday urban life. They gave me more ideas for my own research.
As a PhD student, I am happy that the conference made me feel more connected to my research field and helped me see more opportunities and directions for my future research. It also gave me a valuable window into what academic life and the research community are like.
Ghada Mohamad
“You can drink water from any faucet in this city…and you may walk on its streets any time, day or night”, said the cab driver who was taking me to my hotel; an immigrant from Palestine who’s been living in Vienna for seven years, he continued to tell me about the high-quality free healthcare and education enjoyed by all residents of the city. I remembered his words as I attended what seemed like an endless number of sessions at the RC21 Conference addressing inequalities in cities around the world. Vienna does not preach about social justice. It demonstrates how a city may strive for it.
Meanwhile, and in-between the endless conference sessions addressing inequalities, encounters with new and familiar faces from academia were overshadowed by concerns over job precarity in the North and stark inequalities in the South. A few presenters from the South could not make it; “clearly, they could not secure funding from their institutions to attend the conference. How could they pay for it with their wages!” said an attendee who is originally from the South. Concerns regarding research funding cuts and job insecurity were shared by those from the North. I left beautiful Vienna and the well-organized conference wondering: what is the future of academic research? Can it be separated from the deep inequalities by which the world is plagued today? What would a world without autonomous academic research be like?