We are excited to announce that a new initiative between the Urban Institute and Consejo Latinamericano Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO) has resulted in the launch of the New Urban Glossary Project in City Scapes Magazine.
The Urban Popular Economy Collective is made up of researchers and activists across the world. They have been attempting to conceptualize and engage the relationships between economic accumulation and social reproduction in ways that put social collaboration front and center. This means thinking about work, paid and unpaid, in ways that highlight the everyday practices of urban inhabitants as they put together territories in which to operate, which sustain their imaginations of well-being as part of a process of being with others.
In Latin America, CLACSO, has for several years sponsored a working group on popular economy, and the Urban Institute has made popular economy a major thematic focus of its work. Together they have organized this collective to better understand the ways in which urban life is concretely made from the ground-up.
Their first project has been to put together a glossary of concepts that seek to explore the breadth of experiences and considerations that they feel are important tools to hone in on the makings of such economies. The glossary does not seek to be comprehensive. It doesn’t try to offer an overarching definition, but rather to provoke, explore, pursue different angles, open things up, create space for highlighting different practices, sensibilities, and feelings. The glossary is also an experiment with different kinds of vernaculars, ways of saying things, which they feel is also important to sustain collective investigation.
The project coordinator, has written a preface to introduce the new initiative where he addresses how urban inhabitants develop viable ways of living together and what steps do they take to make different forms of collective life economically possible? Read in full here.