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LSO Ep.10: In Conversation with Evie Papada and Vanessa Konstantinidou | Julia Lurfová and Dr Nerina Boursinou

This month’s conversation revolves around the digitalization of asylum in the Greek context. Our guests are Dr Evie Papada, a human geographer based at the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, and LL.M. Vanessa Konstantinidou, a legal practitioner working in the field of migration and human rights based in Athens, Greece.

Vanessa and Evie contextualize the digitalization of asylum processes within the broader political and historical climate of Greece. On an international level, the changes occuring after the 2016 EU-Turkey deal and during the COVID-19 pandemic are framed as efficiency improvements. However, Evie and Vanessa stress that the ongoing experimentation with asylum processes brings about a complex range of issues, including the protection of personal data, quality control, and further separation between asylum seekers and governmental bodies.

Further resources:
New Pact on Migration and Asylum: ⁠https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asylum/pact-migration-and-asylum_en⁠
AIDA Comparative Report: Digitalisation of Asylum: ⁠https://ecre.org/aida-comparative-report-digitalisation-of-asylum/⁠.

Listen now on Spotify.

Guests: Dr Evie Papada
⁠https://v-dem.net/about/v-dem-institute/scholars-and-staff/evie-papada/⁠
[email protected]

LL.M. Vanessa Konstantinidou

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠This episode was recorded in June 2024.

Logo credits: Alma Hummelsberger
Editor: Eden Igwe
Music: Matthew Lewis (@matthewlewy on Spotify)

Let’s Step Outside (LSO) is a podcast series bringing urban-related activism and exciting research outside the walls of Academia and one step closer to people who don’t fancy talking with jargon. LSO’s episodes feature mainly women researchers/speakers at all stages of their career, as well as a range of activists engaged with all things urban. Delicious food for thought delivered to your ears.

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800 years of St Andrews’ town gardens | a “time travel” panel discussion

From medieval courtyards to contemporary public greens, St Andrews has no shortage of diverse gardens and green spaces.

The Radical Urban Lab, School of Geography and Sustainable Development invites you to “time travel” through nearly a millennium of history, exploring the evolution of gardens in this ancient city.

City, College, Community: 800 years of St Andrews’ town gardens
Parliament Hall, 66 South Street, St Andrews
Friday 4 October 2024
1.00pm to 2.30pm

Moderated by Dong Xia (PhD researcher, School of English), this conversation will feature voices from “town and gown”—Bess Rhodes (Scottish historian, South East Scotland Archaeological Research Framework), Robin Evetts (member and former trustee, St Andrews Preservation Trust; and formerly Historic Scotland) and Alistair Macleod (project manager, Transition University of St Andrews).

Admission is free and all are welcome.

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LSO Ep.9: In Conversation with Dr Thi Bogossian | Julia Lurfová and Dr Nerina Boursinou

In this month’s episode, we are joined by Thi Bogossian, a Brazilian geographer who recently passed their viva at the University of Surrey’s Sociology department. Thi’s ethnographic PhD focused on experiences and perceptions of Polish schoolchildren in the socio-political context of post-Brexit Britain. The project’s findings make for a fascinating conversation, which spans the themes of migration, belonging, navigating multiple identities, relating to more-than-human materialities, and creative participatory methods that can capture children’s lifeworlds.

Towards the end of our conversation, we delve into critical pedagogies that have left Thi particularly inspired to create change in the classroom. We address the current state of the neoliberal academic landscape and try to envision how it could be shaped by collective resistance.

Listen now on Spotify.

Guest: Dr Thi Bogossian
https://research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/persons/thi-bogossian⁠
[email protected]

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠This episode was recorded in June 2024.

Logo credits: Alma Hummelsberger
Editor: Eden Igwe
Music: Matthew Lewis (@matthewlewy on Spotify)

Let’s Step Outside (LSO) is a podcast series bringing urban-related activism and exciting research outside the walls of Academia and one step closer to people who don’t fancy talking with jargon. LSO’s episodes feature mainly women researchers/speakers at all stages of their career, as well as a range of activists engaged with all things urban. Delicious food for thought delivered to your ears.

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LSO Ep.8: In Conversation with Dr Gaja Maestri | Julia Lurfová and Dr Nerina Boursinou

In June’s episode, we are joined by Dr Gaja Maestri, an interdisciplinary social scientist based at Aston University (Birmingham, UK). Gaja’s research interests span across themes of social inequality, migration, gender, and bordering (on both national and domestic scales).

In this conversation, Gaja delves into affects connected to migrant support work – in particular, the differences between compassion, pity, and solidarity. She offers a nuanced perspective on politics involved in pro-migrant volunteering and activism. Towards the end of the episode, Gaja introduces her current project concerning migrant experiences of mothering.

Listen now on Spotify.

Guest: Dr Gaja Maestri
⁠https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gaja-Maestri
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-03736-9
[email protected]

This episode was recorded in April 2024.

Logo credits: Alma Hummelsberger
Editor: Eden Igwe
Music: Matthew Lewis (@matthewlewy on Spotify)

Let’s Step Outside (LSO) is a podcast series bringing urban-related activism and exciting research outside the walls of Academia and one step closer to people who don’t fancy talking with jargon. LSO’s episodes feature mainly women researchers/speakers at all stages of their career, as well as a range of activists engaged with all things urban. Delicious food for thought delivered to your ears.

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RUL proudly presents: Sustainable, Inclusive and Just Cities, Vol.2

The Radical Urban Lab is proud and delighted to present its second book! Sustainable, Inclusive and Just Cities Vol.2 is our collective volume numbering 431 pages, featuring 46 contributions from around the world on the questions of environmental justice, housing, infrastructure and social exclusion. Our expert authors (all students in the 2023/24 cohort of Building Sustainable, Inclusive and Justice Cities, SD4116), present a major sustainability challenge that a city of their choice is faced with, along with suggestions to the community on how to go about tackling this without relying on the support of the authorities.

The result is a stunning mosaic of stories of strife and hope, challenge and opportunity, threat and prosperity. Read the wonderful preface kindly prepared by Prof Deb Cowen of the University of Toronto below!

Preface
Deb Cowen, Professor of Geography, University of Toronto

We are living in defining times. Warnings of apocalypse surround us and fuel fear, rage, and denial – but also beautiful and courageous action. This a time of both profound urban crisis and radical urban repair. This means that what we do and how we know matters profoundly. The material stakes of urban knowledge and practice are hardly new, but as we hurdle through all the cautions from scientists, scholars, communities and social movements about collapsing ecologies, precarious economies, failing infrastructures and deepening divides, it becomes clear that we are at the edge of a precipice. Just and sustainable planetary and urban futures are more contingent than ever on how we apprehend and act at this precise and fraught conjuncture. This collection of exciting work offers deeply thoughtful and creative ways to meet these massive challenges, and thus makes a vital contribution to our collective urban futures.

As the collection demonstrates, cities and urban life both drive and diagnose so many things that are failing to sustain planetary ecologies and economies. Formal processes of urbanization produce untold toxicity and devour precious lands and waters, while they divide and dispossess populations, often failing to provision the bare necessities of life. Almost regardless of the specific topics or places we look to, we can observe these frightening trajectories. Mainstream approaches to urbanization today are not just implicated in processes of planetary change that threaten the very integrity of future life. Because of their anchors in unfettered and extractive growth and unfailing commitments to market models of value, they are often building an expressway to that precipice. This means that trenchant and rigorous critique must be central to any project of sustainability.

As cities and urban life continue to climb out of COVID-19 lockdowns and prepare for the next unknown but anticipated global pandemics, the challenges have accelerated. While people were locked down, capital moved perhaps faster than ever before. Even during ‘lockdowns’, circulation of all kinds required the labour of millions, and countless ‘essential workers’- warehouse workers, port workers, bus drivers, meat packers, nurses and cleaners – succumbed to premature death. In most of the world’s cities, wealth continues to concentrate massively and in fewer hands, as the urban landscape polarizes along the lines of income and race. Dispossession and displacement – long features of settler colonialism – have become trademarks of urban life. Displacement sparks mass movement at all scales – refugees flee economic, climate, and political crises – and they encounter sometimes insurmountable borders within cities in the form of checkpoints, but also borders of belonging and mobility that line nation states. Displacement within cities is often a feature of gentrification, but increasingly it is fueled specifically by its financialized forms. In some places this has meant the wholesale and high-tech remaking of urban landscapes – elite housing complexes complete with private social and physical infrastructures.

The abundance of global precariousness in labour markets elevates precarity to an epoch-defining concept. In response, urban security and surveillance have intensified in many places, now policing a perpetual crisis that has deep roots in old imperial forms. Elsewhere, imperial forms are actively being assembled and deployed. Urban warfare is a standard of our time, whether in Syria or Sudan, while ‘urbicide’ and its corollary, urban genocide, take shape in Gaza in real time for planetary, multi-media witness. So clear are the devastating impacts on Palestinian human life, but so too, the toxic bombardment of munitions, chemical weapons and fossil fuels exhaust local and wider ecologies.

And yet, all these troubling trajectories are being actively and productively challenged by communities and movements around world. Rather than a race to the bottom, we see people and communities making active decisions to change course. Indigenous feminist economist and community leader, Winona LaDuke, explains how Anishinaabe prophecies have long identified this conjuncture, when two distinct paths open before us. She describes how one path is well worn, making it easier to amble along. But the other path, while more challenging initially, can take us much farther and in better ways. The second path that she describes is a sustainable one, which promises to heal relations and ecologies.

We only need look to Glasgow or Toronto to see examples of cities that are working to address the afterlives of relations and infrastructures of urbanization that were first shaped by slavery and colonization. The courageous persistence of Black and Indigenous communities in their demands for redress and repair offer a precious path for us all to walk and help build.

We can look to the projects of urban farming and alternative food economies as example of efforts in many cities, not only to address the immediate question of affordable and nutritious food supply, or to repair local ecologies, but also to generate alternative economies and infrastructures otherwise. In this way, people are working to heal urban landscapes and social worlds and reassemble them in a just and sustainable manner.

In the realm of employment and work, we see growth of cooperative enterprises that at once refuse the tenets of a cutthroat global competitiveness while re-investing in the possibility for democratic economic relations. Simultaneously reconfiguring economies, infrastructures and wider social and ecological relations, co-operative initiatives are offering inspiration that cross sectors. In the field of housing, cooperatives have long provided an inspiring alternative and addition to market or public forms. Co-ops are also accompanied increasingly by community land trusts, which likewise emphasize collective and collaborative governance of urban land and infrastructure. Land trusts sometimes start small, but they can have significant impact on much wider relations by virtue of how they work to bring land into community ownership and care.

We can likewise highlight the rejuvenation of the labour movement, and perhaps most notably in the very sectors that have engineered its global urban decline. Efforts are underway by precarious workers to assert their voice and power in the urban economies that constitute global supply chains. As prime example, we can look to the work of New York’s Amazon Labour Union and their multiracial and gender diverse leadership, who model a form of aspirational politics for precarious young workers of the world.

Of course, infrastructures of circulation and security are being challenged and remade in cities around the world. The proliferation of transit riders’ unions, who demand a seat at the planning table point to a sea change in top-down modernist planning practices. While certainly not brand new, these movements for infrastructural change often emphasize demands for a different process as well as outcome in their claims to city building. Alongside these vital efforts to encourage ecologically and socially enhanced mobility, urban citizens are also fighting carceral forms that erect barriers to movement and sometimes violently contain communities. These are thankfully too numerous to name in all their creative form, but we can simultaneously acknowledge movements for migrant justice, for Black lives, and for a generative politics of ‘abolition’ anchored in efforts to rebuild our social infrastructures.

I write these reflections from New York City, where multi-racial and multi-faith student movements are once again leading the way, courageously rejuvenating faith in the promise of just futures. Columbia students have made powerful stands for global and local justice anchored in their solidarity with Palestinians. But as they confront the crisis in the Middle East, they also come into conflict with campus administrators, and New York police, once again reminding us that the promising change that is underway at the critical conjuncture is often scaled in multiple, intentional and planetary ways.

These reflections highlight some of the beautiful lessons of this book, which brilliantly traces transnational urban geographies and circulation of transformative practice, as much as it also marks the multiple articulations of crises. People are working hard and collaboratively to assemble alternative futures in response to every single challenge named above and the authors guide us expertly in exploring otherwise
urbanism. I am deeply grateful to the authors for their powerful efforts.

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Where Earth Ends: Resources

Photo by Julia Lurfová.

Where Earth Ends wonders what our gardens and green (and blue) spaces were like in the past, and what they might be in the future. We are on a journey to (re)discover places familiar and obscure, exploring the rich lifeworlds around us using all our senses — and more.

With support from the Scotland’s Future Series, we kicked off our programme with two ‘Plugging Into Nature’ interactive soundscaped walks through St Andrews, on Monday 10 June and Tuesday 11 June 2024. See record of associated events here.

Listen to our soundscapes on SoundCloud and view our zine:

Credits and contact

Sources of maps used in the zine:

  • Ordnance Survey (1855). Fife, Sheet 12. Available at: https://maps.nls.uk/view/74426829 (Accessed: 13 June 2024).
  • Elizabeth Gow with Eveline Cowden, Gillian Wood and Dorothy Stewart (2008?). A history of the grounds of St. Mary’s College, University of St. Andrews : a research project undertaken by Heritage Volunteers of Fife Decorative and Fine Arts Society. Available from Rare Books St Andrews Collection (StA LF1119.5S8G7).

    We’d love to hear from you! For queries, feedback, or just to get in touch, email: [email protected].

    Where Earth Ends: Plugging Into Nature © 2024 by Anna Arghiros, Julia Lurfová, Elizabeth Robertson and Benjamin Ong is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

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    ‘Where Earth Ends: Plugging Into Nature’ Events

    Anna Arghiros, Julia Lurfová, Elizabeth Robertson and Benjamin Ong

    (Update: See our results and output here.)

    Have you ever wondered what our gardens and green (and blue) spaces were like in the past, and what they might be in the future?

    Let’s go for a walk! Join the Radical Urban Lab on a journey to (re)discover places familiar and obscure. Reflect on the past, experience the present, and ponder the future as we explore the rich lifeworlds around us using all our senses. 

    Programme of events, suitable for all ages: 

    1. Plugging Into Nature interactive soundscaped walk through St Andrews. 11am to 12pm, Monday 10 and Tuesday 11 June (same walk, repeated). Starts at St Mary’s Quad, off South St, and ends at St Salvator’s Quad, off North St. We will be outdoors, so do dress for changeable weather. A perfect farewell/send-off activity for Graduation! 

    2. Plork Play Kit workshop. 12 to 3pm, Saturday 22 June, Forgan Arts Centre, Newport. Exploring (the future of) green space through play.

    (If you’re interested in the private town gardens of St Andrews, the St Andrews Preservation Trust’s Hidden Gardens event on Sunday 23 June may also be of interest.)  

    In our age of climate anxiety and emergency, Where Earth Ends aims to spark imaginations of ecologically regenerative space. Rooted in play, memory and collective exploration, we draw on place-based approaches, alongside perspectives from history, literature, culture and heritage. This project is supported by Scotland’s Future Series.

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    LSO Ep.7: In Conversation with Nivedita Chatterjee | Julia Lurfová and Dr Nerina Boursinou

    LSO’s May 2024 episode introduces Nivedita Chatterjee’s current PhD research on digital activism against sexual violence in India.

    Nivedita is based at the University of Surrey’s Sociology Department. She is dedicated to bring a postcolonial feminist lens attuned to race, gender, class, and intersectional power struggles to anglocentric academia. In this conversation, we explore her research interests around resistance, media, gender, and sexual violence by delving into the specifics and ethics of researching digital activism within the Indian context.

    Listen now on Spotify.

    Guest: Nivedita Chatterjee
    ⁠https://uk.linkedin.com/in/nivedita-chatterjee-b1bbba11a
    [email protected]

    This episode was recorded in March 2024.

    Logo credits: Alma Hummelsberger
    Editor: Eden Igwe
    Music: Matthew Lewis (@matthewlewy on Spotify)

    Let’s Step Outside (LSO) is a podcast series bringing urban-related activism and exciting research outside the walls of Academia and one step closer to people who don’t fancy talking with jargon. LSO’s episodes feature mainly women researchers/speakers at all stages of their career, as well as a range of activists engaged with all things urban. Delicious food for thought delivered to your ears.

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    LSO Ep.6: In Conversation with Dr Margherita Grazioli | Julia Lurfová and Dr Nerina Boursinou

    In this month’s episode, we share a stimulating conversation with Margherita Grazioli, a fixed-term assistant professor (RTDa) in Economic Geography in the Social Sciences Area of the Gran Sasso Science Institute (L’Aquila, Italy). Margherita is also a steering committee member of the ⁠Beyond Habitation Lab⁠, a Turin-based collective study lab.

    In her work, Margherita explores the right to the city through themes of housing, squatting, and urban commons. As a long-standing member of Rome’s Movimenti per il Diritto all’Abitare (Movement for the Right to Habitation), her academic engagements are firmly rooted in her activist background. Having lived in a housing squat in Rome for six years, Margherita brings a critical perspective to our conversation around housing struggles, which we are thrilled to share with our listeners.

    Listen now on Spotify.

    Guest: Dr Margherita Grazioli ([email protected])
    ⁠https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Margherita-Grazioli
    https://beyondinhabitation.org/team/margherita-grazioli/⁠

    This episode was recorded in February 2024.

    Logo credits: Alma Hummelsberger
    Editor: Eden Igwe
    Music: Matthew Lewis (@matthewlewy on Spotify)

    Let’s Step Outside (LSO) is a podcast series bringing urban-related activism and exciting research outside the walls of Academia and one step closer to people who don’t fancy talking with jargon. LSO’s episodes feature mainly women researchers/speakers at all stages of their career, as well as a range of activists engaged with all things urban. Delicious food for thought delivered to your ears.

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    RUL Report #2.1. Taking Control of the Energy Crisis: Proposing a community-owned solar panel system in Beirut, Lebanon

    Beirut, the capital of Lebanon is home to diverse communities and has a rich and lively culture. Spending the majority of my summers in Beirut since I was a child, has given me insights into the love people have for the city, but also the daily struggles of Beirut citizens since the 15-year civil war started in 1975. More recently, Lebanon has simultaneously been dealing with five crises which are heavily centred around governmental mismanagement (Moore, 2023). These include the Syrian refugee, economic meltdown, and post-covid crises; as well as dealing with the aftermath of the August 2020 Beirut port explosion and the continual effects of climate change. In fact, the World Bank (2021) listed Lebanon as one of the top 3 countries experiencing the most severe crises since the mid 1900s. These crises combined, specifically, the lack of effective governance and severe economic crisis have resulted in an almost complete loss of electricity in the city. I do not pretend to understand the full extent to which the communities in Beirut have been affected by my short yearly stays in Lebanon, however, I will attempt to provide community-led alternative solutions to the energy crisis that move away from government involvement, the root cause of the current conditions in Lebanon.

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