2010
Alternative Urbanisms
Thursday 11th – Friday 12th November 2010, University College London, Gower Street – London – WC1E 6BT UK
This UGRG Conference explored alternative ways of organising, practising and imagining cities. It responds to recent global turbulence and uncertainty in urban capitalist economies, political frameworks and environmental conditions. These urgently demand new ways of challenging existing policies, ideologies and visions, by recognising a broad and complex array of urban geographies, and emphasising the creative and sustainable possibilities of the urban twenty-first century.
Speakers:
Michael Edwards, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. (website)
Colin McFarlane, Department of Geography, Durham University. (website)
Malcolm Miles, Centre for Critical Cultural Resarch, University of Plymouth. (website)
Jane Wills, Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London. (website)
List of all abstracts available here: (pdf/word)
Photos here
2009
Global Cities Now? Current Perspectives in ‘Global Urban Studies’
Thursday 5th – Friday 6th November 2009, Centre for Urban Theory, Swansea University, UK.
The Keynote Speakers were:
Professor Peter Taylor (Loughborough)
Professor Andrew Leyshon (Nottingham)
Professor Wendy Larner (Bristol)
Professor Ian Gordon (LSE)
2008
Urban MultipliCities – Exploring multiple urbanisms and challenging conventional
representations
Thursday 6th – Friday 7th November 2008, Department of Geography, Queen Mary, Univesrity of London, UK.
The Keynote Speakers were:
Dr Mustafa Dikec (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Dr David Pinder (Queen Mary, University of London)
Professor Gillian Rose (Open University)
Professor Egin Isin (Open University)
Urban artscapes: revisioning contemporary London
UCL Urban Laboratory
27th May 2008
This one-day workshop, organised by Andrew Harris from the Urban Laboratory at University College London, brought together geographers, artists, planners, regeneration specialists and architectural historians to assess how London’s urban geographies over the last two decades have been reshaped and reimagined through practices and urban visions associated with art.
The day was divided into four segments. The first examined the locations in London where artists have tended to live and work over the last four decades. It began with Derek Jarman’s rarely screened Super-8 film, Studio Bankside (1970), which captured the everyday world of a group of artists, including Jarman, in a warehouse close to where the Tate Modern is now located. Nick Green from Manchester University then mapped the spread of artist studios across postindustrial East London from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. The session ended with an extract from The London Particular(2004), directed by Benedict Seymour and David Panos, showing how the recycling by artists of formerly down-at-heel areas of inner London such as Shoreditch has been accompanied by new processes of gentrification.
This film extract led into the second half of the morning, which considered how art and art history have been co-opted in the class-based remaking of contemporary London. Andrew Harris from UCL looked at the role of contemporary art in the promotion and consolidation of London as an archetypal ‘global city’ of high finance and business services – at the expense of more diverse and ordinary understandings of the city. Owen Hatherley from Birkbeck dissected how art history has been used as a form of heritage in a variety of recent regeneration projects from Arsenal to Brentford and Woolwich, and how this has helped transform places of working class labour and dwelling into housing for professional elites.
The session after lunch turned to the possibilities for critical artistic interventions in this widespread gentrification of contemporary London. The artist Laura Oldfield Ford discussed her Savage Messiah ‘zines that – reactivating a DIY post-punk aesthetic – use drawings, photomontages and personal narrative from ‘drifts’ around London to provide a schizoid cartographic take on the socio-political reshaping of everyday space. The artist and filmmaker Hilary Powell talked about her interventions around the 2012 Olympics site, including Olympic Spirits and Foodstuffs Ltd, a spoof company she has set up to market the last harvest of London’s Olympic ‘zone’ from fruit gathered on the edges of the Olympic Park.
The day concluded with an exploration of how art can be used to rethink and positively re-appropriate the political and social life of contemporary London. Alex Loftus from Royal Holloway discussed the Generalized Empowerment project run in Brent and Spitalfields by a Belgium-based collective called Citymine(d). This project used artistic interventions to try and open up the everyday environment of London as both a resource and a terrain for negotiating democratic life. Finally Paul Goodwin from Goldsmiths’ Centre for Urban and Community Research detailed a photography exhibition he curated in 2007 called Peckham Rising. Part of a wider agenda of ‘Revisioning Black Urbanism’, this exhibition challenged media representations of Peckham as symbolic of new urban pathologies by highlighting the creative energies and complex and diverse social ecologies of ‘street life’ in the area.
The workshop demonstrated how focusing on the intra-urban geographies of London’s ‘artscapes’ can provide a productive means of conceiving and investigating new aspects of urban change. The consumption and celebration of London’s urban landscapes has been a key feature of the city’s restructuring over the past twenty years, yet there has been surprisingly little analysis of the role of London’s art world in this shift - despite its dynamism, rapid growth and high media profile. The workshop’s focus on urban artscapes also showed the importance of carefully drawing across a variety of disciplinary perspectives from quantitative modelling of urban dynamics to architectural history, and juxtaposing academic research with film-making and art projects. By stirring up conventional academic discussions in this way, significant cultural dimensions can be highlighted that are often overlooked in accounts of growing socio-economic and political urban inequalities. Moreover, the emphasis on art practice offers different possibilities for challenging and revisioning how contemporary cities such as London are experienced, shaped and lived.
2004
UGRG Postgraduate Conference
Emerging Urban Geographies: Connecting Theory, Politics and Practice
27 November 2004
Hosted at:
Queen Mary, University of London
The 2004 UGRG Postgraduate Conference brought together postgraduates from across Europe to present and discuss their emerging and completed research. The conference was themed along the empirical and practical connections that contemporary urban geography makes with contemporary urban programmes and planning initiatives in the spheres of culture, society and economy. The day-long meeting incorporated paper presentations, a poster session, and ‘break-out’ discussion groups addressing key questions about how urban geographical research is of relevance and interest to ‘non-academic’ policy and practice. Discussions ranged from the ways that urban geographers tend to interpret and think about ‘the city’ as an ontology, to how the conceptual ontology of ‘the city’ might be/ought to be re-thought or re-interpreted in our engagements with processes of policy beyond the realms of academe. Two former members of the UGRG Committee – Donald McNeill (King’s College London) and Mike Raco (formerly University of Reading, now also at King’s College London) – kindly offered some summations for the day.
The 2004 Postgraduate Conference was a success in large part to all those who enthusiastically participated in the event. Thanks are also due to the RGS-IBG, for providing a small grant, which offered reimbursements on travel expenses for eligible conference participants. A special thanks is also due to the generous support of Professor Roger Lee and his colleagues at the Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, for hosting and sponsoring the event.
UGRG Postgraduate Conference 2002
30 November 2002
Hosted at:
The UGRG organised its highly successful first Postgraduate Conference in 2002 at the University of Reading. About 25 participants at this conference displayed their research projects in the form of poster presentations. The conference was attended by the entire UGRG Committee.
The general theme of the conference was the distinctiveness of the ‘urban’ within urban geography. A mixture of reading- and poster-based discussions throughout the conference day situated the innovative research projects of the participants in relation to recent works in urban theory and urban geography. One result of this dialogue was a short publication by some of the conference participants in Area:
Susan Moore, James Faulconbridge, Clare Blake, David Westhead, Tom Slater, Gavin Brown, Mark Davidson, Margo Huxley and Eddie Huijbens (2003). ‘Reflections on current developments in contemporary urban geography’, Area 35(2): 217-222.Download PDF copy.
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