Endurance, Resistance, Autonomy: Re-thinking the Liveable City

UNSW Cities Institute and USyd School of Geosciences invite you to a special joint seminar with Prof. Alexander Vasudevan, Professor of Urban Geography, University of Oxford/Christ Church.

Prof Vasudevan’s paper will offer a series of programmatic reflections on the possibilities of collective urban life in our current intensifying emergency.  How can we assemble and sustain a more just urbanism in a time of ecological crisis, planetary-scale dispossession, rising revanchist populisms and hyper-militarised violence?

Building on longstanding research within housing justice movements, the paper seeks to develop a more expansive framework for re-thinking the urban political. More specifically, it offers a sympathetic rejoinder to recent scholarship on ‘urban majority politics’ as a locus of new forms of political action and engagement. It sets out three speculative frames of reference that align everyday urban knowledge and practice with the transformative demands of radical social movements.

This is an approach that centres practices of endurance, repair and survival as sites of collective city-life; that foregrounds the role that political resistance and claim-making play in the re-imagining of city life; and, finally, draws attention to the cultivation of lives that refuse to be tethered to social norms and expectations. At stake here, is a refusal, in the words of the late Lauren Berlant, to ‘relinquish utopian practice’ offering, in contrast, a way of re-assembling the city as a space of necessity, experimentation and emancipation.