In this month’s 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'. Building on their collaborative work for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's Humanity's Urban Future 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 Black History Month 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 (University of Sheffield) and co-director of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, Polytechnic University of Turin. In this episode he draws on themes explored in his work including The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture and Improvised Lives. 

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 Review of International Political Economy, 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 After Nativism: Belonging in an Age of Intolerance and refer back to previous work including Seeing Like a City.

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441)

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

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Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast.