Territories of Southern Urbanism: Race, Displacement, and Edge Populations
Join the Boston University Initiative on Cities, Center on Forced Displacement, and the Boston Urban Salon for a discussion exploring how displacement – both structural and episodic – shapes people’s lives, identities, and urban spaces. Rather than a one-time event, displacement is an ongoing condition that continues to influence how individuals navigate new environments and build lives in unfamiliar cities. Focusing on the United Kingdom, Dr. Romola Sanyal (London School of Economics and Political Science) examines how displaced populations often occupy the racialized margins of urban economies, facing precarious work, persistent poverty, and the risk of further displacement.
At the same time, these communities actively reshape the social and economic fabric of the cities they inhabit. Drawing on migration scholarship, Dr. Sanyal considers how “southern” urban dynamics emerge within “northern” contexts and asks how we understand populations who, despite living in the Global North, remain on its racialized and economic margins.
Dr. Sanyal will be joined by two discussants: Professors Nazli Kibria (Boston University Sociology) and Ayşe Parla (Boston University Anthropology).
Urban Power: Democracy & Inequality in São Paulo & Johannesburg Book Talk & Discussion
Join us for a book discussion featuring Benjamin Bradlow, Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. His new book focuses on the contrasts of São Paulo & Johannesburg in their development as megacities with fairly new democracies and how they have dealt with issues of inequality, administration, and how social movements impacted their development.
Mimi Sheller, Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Marcus Walton, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University, will serve as discussants, joining Professor Bradlow’s talk on the major themes in his new book.
This event is a collaboration between the Initiative on Cities and the Boston Urban Salon, an urban seminar series of Boston area urban experts affiliated with universities and institutes in the area.
Architects Without Frontiers: A Journey from Divided Cities to Zones of Fragility
In-person and on Zoom; register on Eventbrite.
Multiplied Displacement: Governance, Profit, and Solidarity in Urban Migration Regimes in the U.S. and Germany
Join us for our first Boston Urban Salon speaker event featuring Dr. René Kreichauf, an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies & Planning at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels). Professor Kreichauf will analyze how international and internal forms of displacement overlap and reproduce each other with urban processes through displaced migrants in New York City and Berlin as case studies. Focusing on urban governance structures and their purposes, this presentation reveals the economic logic of displacement—how multiple urban actors profit from constantly displacing migrants, the racialization processes employed to produce legitimate displacement, and forms of solidarity and engagement in support of the displaced populations. Dr. Kreichauf also aims to further our understanding of displacement: one that is related to (racial) capitalist value regimes, the position of classed and racialized populations within these regimes, and the broader structures of racial exclusion and marginalization in cities.