Engaged Urban Scholarship across North-South Divides

Presentation Room, Level 2, Michael Young Building, OU, Milton Keynes

International Development seminar hosted jointly with the OU's Citizenship & Governance SRA on Engaged Scholarship.

To reserve your free place, please contact Michelle Stevens.

Abstract
Dr Matthew Thompson (University of Liverpool), Dr Philipp Horn (OU) and Professor Sophie Watson (OU) will discuss the relevance of two dominant approaches in contemporary urban theory for engaged urban scholarship and practice:

1. universalising theories of neoliberal and planetary urbanisation
2. poststructuralist and postcolonial theories emphasising difference.

After exploring these issues through a North-South comparison – Liverpool, UK and La Paz, Bolivia – of collective (re)appropriation of urban land for community use, the session will consider how to develop a nexus of Northern- and Southern-focused engaged scholarship with a more unified conceptual vocabulary on topics such as inclusive urbanisation, collective land management and the 'right to the city'.

Speakers
Dr Matthew Thompson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy and Practice, University of Liverpool. His research focuses on the role of play in the development of more socially transformative urban innovation, geared toward social empowerment. At the Heseltine Institute, he is researching the scale and scope of the social economy in the Liverpool City Region. Matthew previously completed his PhD in the planning department at the University of Manchester on affordable housing and neighbourhood regeneration in Liverpool since the 1960s. He compared specifically the city’s 1970s housing cooperative movement and the emerging community land trust movement, notably the Turner Prize-winning project in Granby.

Dr Philipp Horn is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the OU’s SRA in Inclusive Innovation and International Development. His research interests include rights-based approaches to urban development, indigenous land management, and models of plurinational citizenship. At the OU, he is currently undertaking research on peri-urban land conflict solutions in Bolivia. Philipp previously completed his PhD at the Global Urban Research Centre, University of Manchester on the role of indigeneity in urban policies and planning in a context of constitutional changes that have taken place in the Latin American countries of Bolivia and Ecuador.