Keynote Speakers

Abstract for Keynote:

Global Dialects of Urban Terrormindedness: How Terrorism is Changing Cityscapes in the Global South and North

How have urban institutions and individuals struggled with everyday living in cities threatened by various forms of political terror? In my presentation I propose to understand this struggle through the historical development of various urban forms of terrormindedness that capture how urban societies learn to live with terror through an ‘posthumanist’ domestication of the cityscape’s materialities. At least three forms of modern terrormindedness can be discerned beginning with the interwar airmindedness that tried to help citizens and city dwellers cope with the future threat of aerial bombing warfare. This was followed by the Cold War nuclearmindedness that prepared cities for the threat of nuclear weapons and which beginning with the 1970s threats of ‘urban guerillas’ was replaced by an increasing terrorismmindedness.

My presentation will use historical and contemporary case-studies to discuss the emergence of different global ‘dialects’ of urban terrormindedness – different local urban vernaculars based on a common global grammar. My historical exposition focus on London, Berlin and Chicago, while the contemporary examples take from New York, Stockholm, Lahore and Tokyo thus discuss experiences from both Global South and North cityscapes that through traumatic terrorism events have been adapted to cope with terror as a part of everyday urban life.

Abstract for Keynote:

Urban Political Ecology – from epistemology to praxis for a climate emergency

In this talk, I shall focus on the recently published book: Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency (Kaika, Keil, Mandler and Tzaninis (eds), 2023) to affirm the relevance of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) as an ontological, epistemological, and methodological intervention that can help address the socio-environmental emergencies of the twenty-first century.

Urban political ecology scholarship unsettles ‘traditional’ understandings of ‘cities’ as ontological entities separate from ‘nature’ and develops methods to examine how the production of settlements is metabolically linked with flows of capita, but also to more than-human ecological processes.

Acknowledging UPE’s rich intellectual history; a) I discuss how UPE tries to go beyond splitting research between social sciences and natural sciences; and b) I identify recently emerging ontologies and epistemologies within UPE that take the field forward. These address:

1. New forms of extended urbanisation.

2. Situated forms of knowledge production

3. More than human socio-ecological and economic practices

4. The uneasy interface between politics, policy, and academic debate over urbanization and climate change.

I argue that exploring UPE’s new ontologies, epistemologies and methods is not simply an academic exercise, that helps move an academic field forwards. It is also significant for making academic research relevant to politics; for moving towards new forms of action.

A heating planet is an emerging reality to which scholars must respond.

This Keynote is online lecture.