Category: RUL talks

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Municipalism and the Commons (RUL week of events)

Ana Méndez de Andés (University of Sheffield)

Teams meeting link for livestream

Four years after the square occupations under the banner ‘Real Democracy Now’, citizen-based platforms presented to the Spanish local elections, and consolidated an institutional assault that won some of the most important cities – Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza or A Coruña – and dozens of smaller towns and villages. In their practice, Spanish municipalism appealed to the idea of thecommons to advance an institutional change towards radical democratic governance of collective resources. Thecommons were included in the name of some of the newly created local parties – such as Barcelona en Comú, meaning Barcelona in Common – and in public events, regulations and strategic plans, as well as in the rationale of the internal municipalist debates. This session presents a research on the effort to develop urban commoning processes in the so-called ‘cities of change’ and how the articulation of thecommons’ democratic ethos has shaped an alternative planning strategy situated in the middle of things: between social demands and state-driven programmes, political narrative and administrative normative, inside and outside public institutions. 

Ana Méndez de Andés is an architect and activist from Madrid (Spain). She was advisor to Madrid City Council as part of the municipalist platform Ahora Madrid and has coordinated the European Municipalist Network. Her research ‘Becoming-common of the public’ – documented in the Open Science Platform, under a Creative Commons license – holds an ESRC White Rose DTP award and has been supervised by Dr. Doina Petrescu (Sheffield School of Architecture) and Dr. Beth Perry (Urban Institute). She has co-authored the Urban Commons Handbook, the Municipalist Ecosystem and Urban Commoning in Europe maps, and co-edited the compilations Códigos Comunes Urbanos and Atlas del Cambio (in Spanish).

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Featured Latest from the Lab RUL talks RUL week of events

Housing as Commons (RUL week of events)

Experiences of the struggle for housing, ignited by the lack of social and affordable housing, have led to the establishing of shared and self-managed housing areas. In such a context, it becomes crucially important to re-think the need to define common urban worlds “from below”. Here, Penny Travlou and Stavros Stavridis trace contemporary practices of urban commoning through which people re-define housing economies. Connecting to a rich literature on the importance of commons and of practices of commoning for the creation of emancipated societies, the authors discuss whether housing struggles and co-habitation experiences may contribute in crucial ways to the development of a commoning culture. The authors explore a variety of urban contexts through global case studies from across the Global North and South, in search of concrete examples that illustrate the potentialities of urban commoning.

Dr Penny Travlou is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography and Theory at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh. Her research is interdisciplinary focusing on social justice, the commons, collaborative practices, emerging networks, feminist methodologies, critical landscape theory, epistemologies of the South and ethnography. 

She is also the Co-Director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens, a non-profit independent research organisation that focuses on feminist and queer studies, participatory education and activism.

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The Home Office’s ‘hotel maximisation’ policy (RUL week of events)

Dr Anna Pearce (University of St Andrews)

Teams meeting link for livestream

Tuesday Feb 5, 2-3pm, Arts Seminar Room 6

‘Smoke and Mirrors’ – Policy Incoherence as a Portal into the History and Politics of Asylum Accommodation Management in the UK

This presentation examines the Home Office’s recent ‘hotel maximisation’ policy, which aims to significantly increase the number of ‘bedspaces’ across the asylum accommodation estate by utilising MoD barracks sites and enforcing room sharing across the hotels currently being used. Whilst the expansion of hotels and HMOs to accommodate people seeking the asylum is a relatively new phenomenon, placing it within the historical trajectory of asylum accommodation in the UK reveals the carceral and value-extractive tendencies which have always been a feature of this provision. Using the policy’s moments of contradiction, opacity and incoherence as apertures to inquiry, a novel theoretical conception of the ‘asylum seeker’ as a double abstraction of both law and capital is presented. This composite category enables us to reach the heart of the Home Office’s current conundrum, in which policy objectives are arguably now driven by private sector motivations, with significant implications for the independence of the legislature from capital.

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Blog Featured Latest from the Lab RUL talks RUL week of events

For a liberatory politics of home (RUL week of events)

Professor Michele Lancione (University of Torino)

Teams meeting link for livestream

In For a Liberatory Politics of Home, Michele Lancione questions accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, Lancione attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, Lancione provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.

Michele Lancione is Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Polytechnic University of Turin and coeditor of Grammars of the Urban Ground, also published by Duke University Press, and Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power and the City.

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Nick Gill in conversation @GOSSIP &RUL

November 24, 13:30-14:30, Hebdomadars room, St Andrews. Click here to join the meeting.

Professor Nick Gill, Exeter // Chair: Professor Nissa Finney, St Andrews // Discussant: Dr Vanessa Schofield, St Andrews

Inside Asylum Appeals: Access, Participation and Procedure
Appeals are a crucial part of Europe’s asylum system, but remain poorly understood. Building on insights and perspectives from legal geography and socio-legal studies, and drawing on hundreds of ethnographic observations of appeal hearings as well as research interviews, this presentation paints a detailed picture of the limitations of refugee protection available through asylum appeals. Although refugee law can appear dependable and reliable in policy documents and legal texts the discussion offers a unique insight into the reality that myriad social, political, psychological, linguistic, contextual and economic factors interfere with, and frequently confound, the protection that it promises during its concrete enactment. Combining evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom, the presentation therefore evokes a clear sense of the fragility of legal protection for people forced to migrate to Europe.

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GOSSIP and RUL present: Professor Matt Sparke

We are delighted to welcome Prof Matt Sparke (University of California, Santa Cruz)!

April 20, 2023
Forbes Laboratory (IRV: 209)
Irvine Building
University of St. Andrews

10am – 11am / PhD Student Workshop
Generative Geographies and Other Impact
Factors: On Publishing (not Perishing) in the
Shadows of Metrics

1pm – 2pm / Research Seminar
Inequalities and possibilities of bio-pharma
urban development

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Blog Featured Latest from the Lab RUL talks

RUL&GOSSIP talk: Spatial Politics, Solidarity Infrastructures, and Unemployed Organising: Dr Paul Griffin, April 3

The Radical Urban Lab and GOSSIP at the School of Geography and Sustainable Development proudly present:

Dr Paul Griffin (Northumbria University)

Spatial Politics, Solidarity Infrastructures, and Unemployed Organising


This talk will reflect on the politicisation of unemployment across UK towns and cities in the early 1980s. With a particular focus on trade union and community organising, the presentation will reflect on the role of Unemployed Workers’ Centres in articulating opposition to deindustrialisation, redundancies, and long-term unemployment. Focusing upon centres as ‘solidarity infrastructures’ allows an analysis that considers the quieter acts of care and advice alongside organising practices and campaigning. This paper revisits these histories through archives and oral histories of unemployed organising and includes reflections on the People’s March for Jobs 1981, the emergence of TUC Unemployed Workers’ Centres and wider unemployed resistances. In doing so, it connects with ongoing works across social movement studies and labour geographies, as well as related works focusing upon the politics of working-class presence within urban environments.


April 3, 2023
12pm – 1pm
Lapworth laboratory (IRV: 208)
Irvine Building
University of St. Andrews

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RUL talk: Dr Nelli Kambouri, Thinking about affective and reproductive labour in offline work managed by online platforms.

Join Nelli’s talk live here on November 17th.

The literature on platform labour has addressed affective labour mostly in relation to online platforms like Facebook, in which unpaid tasks are carried out in a seemingly seamless environment of entertainment, leisure and fun. Most users that carry out this unpaid affective labour do not even realise that the content they are producing and the digital interactions that they take part in are labour practices and that these are in fact part of the production process. In that sense, large digital companies extractivism of digital social relation is fundamental to the critique of contemporary digital capitalism.

My research interest lies in expanding that critique to include different types of platforms, including those that involve offline work. In the past years I have conducted research on platforms that manage offline work, including delivery, transport, domestic work and care, and short-term rentals as part of the PLUS project https://project-plus.eu/. The research was conducted in London from 2019-2022 and included interviews with platform workers and participants observation in Uber, Deliveroo and Airbnb. In the context of this rearach, I came across several care and affective practices that emerge within and around those platforms determining how labour relations are organised and how inequalities of class, gender, ethnicity and race are produced. Thus I tried to explore the following questions:

  • How can we include reproductive labour and work-life balance in our analyses of this type of platform labour?
  • How can we rethink affective labour in these platforms from an intersectional gender perspective?
  • How is algorithmic control impacting work-life balance and on affective labour emerging within and/or around these platforms?

Nelli Kambouri is a political scientist currently working as a senior research fellow at the Centre for Gender Studies, Department of Social Policy, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, in Athens Greece.

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Blog Featured Latest from the Lab RUL talks

RUL&GOSSIP talk: Prof Colin McFarlane, September 27, noon-1pm

The Radical Urban Lab at the School of Geography&Sustainable Development is delighted to welcome Prof Colin McFarlane (Durham), author of Fragments of the City (California UP, 2021) on September 27, at noon in the Forbes room (1st floor, Irvine building, School of Geography and Sustainable Development).

Colin’s talk is kindly co-hosted with GOSSIP (the School’s Geographies of Sustainability, Society, Inequalities and Possibilities Group).

All welcome!

Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change.

In Fragments of the City, Colin McFarlane examines such fragments, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? For those living on the economic margins, the city is often experienced as a set of fragments. Much of what low-income residents deal with on a daily basis is fragments of stuff, made and remade with and through urban density, social infrastructure, and political practice.

In this book, McFarlane explores infrastructure in Mumbai, Kampala, and Cape Town; artistic montages in Los Angeles and Dakar; refugee struggles in Berlin; and the repurposing of fragments in Hong Kong and New York. Fragments surface as material things, as forms of knowledge, as writing strategies. They are used in efforts to politicize the city and in urban writing to capture life and change in the world’s major cities. Fragments of the City surveys the role of fragments in how urban worlds are understood, revealed, written, and changed.

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