We are delighted to announce that the first Sheffield Urbanism Lecture Series is now available on YouTube. For those who missed it first time around or those who want to listen to the lectures again, please access via the links below
The Sheffield Urbanism Lecture series is an initiative of the Urban Institute to generate provocative and nonstandard propositions for understanding processes of urbanization and urban life. It is intended as a space to reimagine both the conceptualizations and narratives of urban studies.
The inaugural series of lectures for 2020 was delivered by Professor AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow at the Institute. Entitled "The Urban Surrounds: From Extinction to Abolition" the first series explored how abolitionist ontologies, largely elaborated through critical Black thought and practice, are pre-figured in the spaces, times, and practices of contemporary urbanization. Focusing largely on sites drawn across the Global South, the lectures proposed the surrounds as a multidimensional, unsettled domain, which - while incorporated into urban systems - remains a locus of invention, reworking of collective life, and uncanny resistance. The surrounds is a concrete image of not only what might come, but what might already be here—a tremulous, yet confident positing of life beyond capture and debilitative repetition. There were 3 lectures is in the series:
Sheffield Urbanism Series - Lecture 1: Without Capture
How has the urban as the “proper” context for a self-reflecting, continuously self-improving human been based on fundamental misconceptions of both the human and of life? This lecture argued that the ambivalent generativity of blackness is a key resource in rethinking urbanization not just in terms of space and territory, but of the very reshaping of the human
Sheffield Urbanism Series - Lecture 2: It's Forgetting Time
Invoking this ironical query of black resistance struggles, the intersection of quantum physics with black temporalities and the planetary scope of contemporary urbanization process amplify the heterogeneity of multiple times. In face of myriad potential extinctions (for instance, posed by climate change or financial indebtedness to the future), the collapse of clear temporal distinctions is increasingly folded into the operating systems of urban development
Sheffield Urbanism Series – Lecture 3: Redemption Without Rebellion
While conventional responses to the implications of climate change on urbanization centre on intensifying the density and self-sufficiencies of human settlements, contemporary urban processes now largely produce wide-spread unsettling. Across vast expanses of diverse landscapes, settlement is now increasingly provisional and taking place in wildly disparate built environment settings and regulatory conditions. This lecture explored the questions and issues raised by such recognitions, including the possibilities for abolishing the historical dependence upon anti-blackness and human-centrism that has established extinction as our common horizon