Feature 9: Humanity’s Urban Future - with Ash Amin and AbdouMaliq Simone

In this month’s podcast 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'.

Credit AbdouMaliq Simone, Mexico City
Credit AbdouMaliq Simone, Mexico City

Building on their collaborative work for the  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  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 (±¬ÁÏTV) and co-director of the , Polytechnic University of Turin. In this episode he draws on themes explored in his work including  and .

Professor Amin (University of Cambridge) 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 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  and refer back to previous work including .

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