Open Sessions Workshop

The Open Sessions Workshop creates a space to seize and share exchange opportunities within the Lab’URBA community: publication launches by lab members, meetings with invited researchers or post-docs, discussions around interdisciplinary work, and more.

This seminar brought together members of Lab’URBA and the “Urban Studies, Cities Knowledge Environment” Department of Malmö University for two sessions on the urban production of undesirability and the temporary use of vacant buildings to house migrants in Paris.

Lab’URBA offered doctoral and postdoctoral researchers an information and discussion session on qualification by the French National Council of Universities (Conseil National des Universités - CNU).

Roger Keil, visiting researcher at Lab’URBA and professor at the Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change, York University (Toronto, ON), gave a lecture organised by the “Regulations: actors, urban policies, and urban planning practices” research axis.

The Polycritical Periphery: Crisis Urbanism in the Suburbs Cities around the world have lately been threatened by wildfires, have been flooded and destroyed by war. While in many urban regions, dangerous infectious diseases are endemic, all cities on the planet now have the experience of a pandemic brought on by an emerging infectious disease that has been linked to extensive urbanization. In this presentation, I will look at this polycrisis from the perspective of the urban periphery, or to put it differently, in the context of the “suburban century.” Conventionally, urban political economy concerns itself with the workings of cities and urbanization. The mentioned recent experiences force us to account more explicitly for the permanent disaster and breakdown urban life represents for many in today’s cities, not just at moments of fires, droughts, wars, disease and economic uncertainty. How can we understand this condition of recurring disaster? How can cities prepare? What can urban life offer to building resistant structures of defense that protect people from the vulnerabilities and risks in a world of upheaval?