Humanitiy's Urban Future
What makes a city truly good? Tom and Beth talk with Ash Amin and AbdouMaliq Simone about belonging, inclusion, and how Black urbanism can shape fairer, more connected cities.
In this month’s feature Tom and Beth are joined by two leading scholars of the urban condition - Ash Amin and AbdouMaliq Simone - to reflect on questions of inclusion and belonging in the search for the 'good city'. Building on their collaborative work for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's Humanity's Urban Future programme, our guests consider:
- Are ideas of the good city still relevant in face of worsening inequality, segregation and individualism?
- Can a progressive politics of belonging overcome these divisions in a renewed urban public sphere?
- And, as Black History Month draws to an end, how might ideas of ‘black urbanism’ inform and enrich the field of urban studies?
Guests:
AbdouMaliq Simone works on issues of spatial composition in extended urban regions, the production of everyday life for urban majorities in the Global South, infrastructural imaginaries, collective affect, global blackness, and histories of the present for Muslim working classes. He is Professor Emeritus at the Urban Institute and co-director of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, Polytechnic University of Turin. In this episode he draws on themes explored in his work including The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture and Improvised Lives.
Professor Ash Amin is known for his work on the geographies of modern living: cities and regions as relationally constituted; globalisation, race and multiculture as a hybrid of biopolitics, and vernacular practices. He was founding co-editor of the Review of International Political Economy, is associate editor of City and is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences. In this episode we discuss his recent book After Nativism: Belonging in an Age of Intolerance and refer back to previous work including Seeing Like a City.
Credits
- Guest: Professor AbdouMaliq Simone (Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield)
- Guest: Professor Ash Amin (Emeritus 1931 Professor of Geography and Fellow of Christ’s College)
- Podcast Production, Presentation & Editing: Tom Goodfellow (Professor of Urban Studies and International Development at the University of Sheffield)
- Podcast Production, Presentation & Editing: Beth Perry (Professor of Urban Epistemics at the University of Sheffield and Director of the Urban Institute)
- Post-Production Editing & Marketing: Polly Clifton (Student at the University of Sheffield)
- Training & Production Support: Jack Clayton (Creative Media Service Support Adviser at the University of Sheffield)
- Distribution, Promotion and Marketing: Vicky Simpson (Research Manager at the University of Sheffield)
- Podcast Cover: Dan Farley Designs
- Music: Horizon (Music by Tom Goodfellow, Recorded & Produced by Alan Thomson), Falling Down (Music by Tom Goodfellow, Performed by the Dice, Produced by Alan Thomson)
- Special Thanks: Supported by the Faculty of Social Science and the Creative Media Suite at the University of Sheffield
