Digging The City, Postdoc seminar about urban conflicts
Thursday 12 May, time: 19.00 – 20.30, Centrale OBA, 1st floor.
Limited space, increasing diversity, and varying perspectives on what makes a ‘just city’, make the urban context prone to conflicts among citizens, policy makers, professionals, and other users. What can we learn from these conflicts? What do they tell us about struggles around representation, inequality, belonging, and governance? Citizens do not experience these struggles in abstract terms, but in everyday negotiations at the street-level of their urban neighborhoods. Therefore, the interactions between stakeholders in situations of conflict can function as laboratories to understand how citizenship gets performed through informal and unconventional street-level practices. Nanke Verloo conducted four years of ethnographic case study research in which she immersed into the dramas of people who inhabit, govern, or practice in the urban environment. Her study suggests that these episodes of urban conflict are moments of opportunity for ‘negotiated democracy’. How can we include the practices of people dealing with conflict in decision-making and urban planning? What can policy makers and planners learn from conflicts at the street-level?
Presented by Nanke Verloo.
Registration for this seminar is not required.