Events & Seminars 2013-14
15 Oct 2013: The Frankfurt School on Israel
Time: 17:15
Venue: Room 407, Boyd Orr Building
Presenter: Professor Jack Jacobs (City University of New York)
Jointly hosted with CSSTM
"I will explore the range of views which existed within the founding generation of the Frankfurt School on matters pertaining to Israel and Zionism, with particular attention to the ideas of Marcuse, Fromm, Horkheimer, and Lowenthal, and will attempt to explain the subtle differences which existed among these thinkers on this issue by examining the differences in their family backgrounds and their knowledge of Judaism. I argue that there is an inverse relation among members of the School between knowledge of Jewish religious ideas and criticism of the State of Israel. The deeper the thinker’s familiarity with Judaism, the stronger the thinker’s critique of Israel."
All welcome
The Sociology Seminar Series is supported by the MacFie Bequest, named after Professor Alec MacFie, Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University from 1945 to 1958.
25 Oct 2013: Big Data and Urban Informatics: Examples, Prospects and Challenges
Time: 15:00
Venue: Room 916 Adam Smith Building
This talk will focus on recent developments on the use of Big Data for urban planning, policy and business innovations. Examples of recent work in this area will be given. The importance of Open Data initiatives and open source tools and technologies will be discussed, as well as emerging informal networks of urban data infomediaries and civic hackers who are likely to play a transformative role in urban informatics. The value that citizens can bring through Information and Communications Technologies in cities of the future will be discussed with examples. Finally, critical challenges in connecting urban informatics to urban innovations will be identified.
22 Nov 2013: Paying the Price? Homes and housing wealth
Time: 15:00
Venue: Room 916 Adam Smith Building
Presenter: Dr Beverley Searle, University of Dundee
Homes are important. They are central to our lives providing shelter and emotional security. They are also the major element of household expenditure. More recently owned homes are increasingly perceived as a major investment vehicle; providing a financial resource across the life course. In particular, housing wealth is seen as a major component of asset-based welfare in later life. However home ownership is risky. The recent economic crisis - in which housing played a major role - has drawn attention (not for the first time) to the sustainability of home ownership. Home buyers are exposed to the vagaries of the housing financial markets and government policy and regulations. Furthermore, social implications arise from the unequal concentration of wealth resources in housing and its new role in financial and sustainable welfare policy. Who will pay the price for positioning home ownership as the nation’ welfare resource?
The Urban Studies Seminar Series, sponsored by the McFie Bequest, is open to all students and staff of the University as well as people from outside the University. Should you have particular accessibility requirements, please make contact with the organisers in advance and we will do our best to assist. For further information and final confirmation of any Seminar, please contact Mark Livingston or Julie Clark on (0141) 330 6162/330 4516.
6 Dec 2013: Urban Reflections: Disciplinary and Methodological Challenges of Using Film to Tell the Story of Planning
Time: 15:00
Venue: Room 916 Adam Smith Building
Presenter: Mark Tewdwr-Jones, Professor of Town Planning, Newcastle University
Planning has always been concerned with technical achievements, set within politicized and contentious contexts, while attempting to mediate between conflicting interests and constituencies. But to what extent is it possible for planning to reach out and embrace place sensitivity and communicate the need for or resistance to urban change on the terms of place users, rather than on the terms of planning professionals? As planning moves to become more sensitive to community’ desires, understanding place and place distinctiveness requires planners to learn new concepts and new methods. It is my contention that planning and place, and people’ perceptions of planning and of places, are indecorously bound together, and utilising images, stories and film from cultural sources is a highly effective way to reflect not only different perceptions of place and urban change, but also on the role and status of urban planning itself. With examples drawn from UK planning and British film history, the presentation considers how perceptions toward planning have been reflected in film through the decades, and that these serve as a useful frame for professionals and researchers to appreciate communities’ emotional attitudes toward place and change.
The Urban Studies Seminar Series, sponsored by the McFie Bequest, is open to all students and staff of the University as well as people from outside the University. Should you have particular accessibility requirements, please make contact with the organisers in advance and we will do our best to assist. For further information and final confirmation of any Seminar, please contact Mark Livingston or Julie Clark on (0141) 330 6162/330 4516.
10 Dec 2013: White Flight and Residential Sorting: Can Residential Mobility Explain Environmental Injustice?
Time: 16:30
Venue: YUDOWITZ Lecture Theatre, Ground Floor of the WOLFSON MEDICAL SCHOOL BUILDING (Room:253), University of Glasgow
‘Using A Structural Model of Neighbourhood Dynamics to Simulate the Impact of Environmental Disamenities on Location Decisions’
Abstract: Effective environmental justice policy requires an understanding of the economic and social forces that determine the correlation between race, income, and pollution exposure. We show how the traditional approach used in many environmental justice analyses cannot identify nuisance-driven residential mobility. We develop an alternative strategy that overcomes this problem and implement it using data on air toxics from Los Angeles County. Differences in estimated willingness-to-pay for cleaner air across race groups support the residential mobility explanation. Our results suggest that household mobility responses eventually work against policies designed to address inequitable siting decisions for facilities with environmental health risks.
Chris Timmins is a leading international expert in urban and environmental economics and has published in leading international journals such as the American Economic Review and Econometrica. His research has focussed on developing cutting-edge empirical methods for the valuation of local public goods and amenities, with a particular focus on hedonic techniques and models of residential sorting. His recent research has helped advance the methods used to measure the costs associated with exposure to poor air quality, the benefits associated with remediating brownfields and toxic waste under the Superfund program, the costs of exposure to shale gas development, and the valuation of non-marginal changes in disamenities, such as the large reductions in violent crime that occurred in many US cities during the 1990’.
24 Jan 2014: The Housing Market Renewal programme in Northern England: Lessons from the past and challenges for the future
Time: 16:30
Venue: tbc
Speaker: Brendan Nevin (Director, North Housing Consulting)
This event is being jointly held with Policy Scotland.
During the thirty years 1970-2000 many inner urban areas in older ex industrial towns and cities in the North and Midlands of England experienced significant population loss which was driven by employment change and decentralisation encouraged by planning policies which supported suburbanisation. These processes increasingly segregated the poorest communities from an increasingly affluent society, and by the turn of the century this was being reflected in the collapse of some neighbourhoods which had been (expensively) refurbished following the closure of the clearance programmes in the 1970s as collapses in housing demand spread beyond social housing estates to multi tenure Victorian neighbourhoods.
The response to this urban disintegration was the development of a Market Renewal programme focused upon nine areas of England with a combined population of one million residents. The boundaries of the areas were deliberately constructed to take in large fragments of urban areas and housing markets to ensure the coordination of programmes designed to regenerate housing and labour markets and to ensure that the Planning system could operate in a more equitable manner in respect of new residential development. To support this a Housing Market Renewal Fund was created to facilitate clearance, refurbishment and new build. The programme was operational between 2002 and 2011 when it was prematurely terminated by the Coalition Government. During this time around œ7bn of public and private housing investment refurbished around 120,000 properties, and demolished 35,000. A similar number were constructed using land, public subsidy and planning powers.
The Market Renewal programme was a contested renewal programme, being opposed by environmentalists, both left and right of centre journalists, some progressive and ‘radical’ academics and occasionally residents (largely homeowners affected by clearance). However it was only in 2011 (after abolition) that the Conservative Party registered opposition at a national level. Given the long history of the programme it is proposed to divide the presentation into three parts. The first will explore the socio economic and housing market changes which led to the creation of the programme. The second will critically explore the extent to which housing and labour markets were influenced by the programme and the distributional issues which arose from its implementation. The third will detail how Local Authorities have endeavoured to finish renewal schemes and outline the emerging issues for these areas post 2015 when the financial resources of localities will have largely expired.
Biography
Brendan Nevin is a Director of North Housing Consulting, an independent research consultancy, he was formerly a Director of Nevin Leather Associates a Public Policy Consultancy. Brendan has been committed to improving the linkages between academic research and the development of Public Policy for more than two decades. He has been an active researcher since 1989, having held a variety of full-time and visiting positions at British universities during this period. Brendan has developed an extensive body of Policy relevant research, focused on exploring the changing dynamics of place at regional, sub-regional, city and neighbourhood levels. This research has focused on identifying the drivers of spatial change and their relationship with economic, housing, strategic planning and infrastructure development policy. Brendan was instrumental in developing and implementing the Housing Market Renewal Programme from 1998 to 2011.
Urban Studies seminars are sponsored by the Macfie bequest.
21 Feb 2014: China's 'Africa Town': An ethnic enclave in a changing landscape
Time: 15:00
Venue: Room 916, Adam Smith Building
Speaker: Zhigang Li (Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University)
Urban Studies seminars are sponsored by the Macfie bequest.
28 Feb 2014: Transplanting Urban Borders in the Pearl River Delta Bay Area
Time: 15:00
Venue: Room 916, Adam Smith Building
Speaker: Roger Chan (Associate Professor, Department of Urban Planing and Design, University of Hong Kong)
Urban Studies seminars are sponsored by the Macfie bequest. It is open to all students and staff of the University as well as people from outside the University. Should you have particular accessibility requirements, please make contact with the organisers in advance and we will do our best to assist. For further information and final confirmation of any Seminar, please contact Mark.Livingston@glasgow.ac.uk.
7 Mar 2014: Hybrid gentrification in South Africa: Theorising across southern and northern cities
Time: 15:00
Venue: Room 916, Adam Smith Building
Speaker: Charlotte Lemanski (Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University College London)
Urban Studies seminars are sponsored by the Macfie bequest.
21 Mar 2014: Context And Choice: The Everyday Social-Spatial Activities Of Youths In Two Low-Income, Multi-Ethnic Neighbourhoods
Time: 15:00
Venue: Room 916, Adam Smith Building
Speaker: Kirsteen Visser (University of Utrecht)
Urban Studies seminars are sponsored by the Macfie bequest.
25 Apr 2014: People, Networks and Neighbourhoods: Explaining the Impacts of Tenant Relocation
Time: 15:00
Venue: Room 916, Adam Smith Building
Speaker: Professor William M. Rohe Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Urban Lab, Glasgow School of Art
Boshamer Distinguished Professor of City and Regional Planning and Director, Center for Urban and Regional Studies, University of North Carolina
From its inception in 1992 the U.S. HOPE VI program has provided over 250 grants to 120 cities, to demolish 96,000 public housing units and either construct or rehabilitate 111,000 units. One of the central objectives of the program is to improve the lives of residents living in the targeted developments. The existing research, however, presents a mixed picture of the impacts of whether the relocates are helped or hurt by relocation. Some stress that relocation disrupts important social networks, while others emphasize improvements in neighbourhood conditions that often result from relocation. This paper seeks to address this debate by assessing the impacts of relocation on several outcome indicators: neighbourhood satisfaction, fear of crime, psychological health, and employment. It also seeks to identify the demographic, social and neighbourhood factors that are associated with those impacts.
These questions are addressed with data from a panel study of 283 households, which were relocated for a public housing development in Charlotte, North Carolina. The baseline and follow-up surveys included demographic, social and economic indicators. The basic findings of the study show that relocated residents were more satisfied with their new neighbourhoods, felt safer, were less depressed after the move, and were more likely to be employed. Those who were relocated to private housing, rather than to other public housing developments, tended to report higher levels of these positive outcomes. Among all relocates, those with higher levels of education and more social support were more likely to move to higher quality neighbourhood, while disabled residents and those with higher levels of depression were more likely to move to neighbourhoods with higher levels of violent crime. Finally, the increase in hours worked was particularly strong among those with children and who had higher incomes before relocation. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.
Urban Studies seminars are sponsored by the Macfie bequest.
9 May 2014: Violent exchange: Corruption and Sovereign Power in urban centres of the Global South
Time: 15:00
Venue: Room 916, Adam Smith Building
Speaker: Steffen Jensen (Senior researcher, Dignity Institute, Denmark)
Biography
Steffen Jensen is Senior Researcher at Dignity: Danish Institute Against Torture. He has published on issues of violence, gangs, vigilante groups, human rights, urban and rural politics, as well as on the relationship between security and development in rural and urban South Africa and urban Philippines. He has published ‘Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town’ along with edited volumes on human rights, security, policing and victimhood.
Abstract
In this presentation, I propose two related arguments. Firstly, I argue that there is an intimate connection between corruption and police violence. Against the frequent distinction between the two, when a police officer ‘asks’ for bribe in return for not imprisoning or violating someone, an intimate link between the potentiality of state violence and monetary transactions is evident. I propose to explore this connection under the framework of violent exchange. Through this concept, I combine foci on sovereign power and reciprocity as a moral and utilitarian interaction to understand policing encounters as relational and reciprocal practices of (dis)respect, monetary transactions and violence taking place between law enforcement agencies and those they police. Secondly, the paper argues that violent exchanges and how they unfold crucially depend on where in the urban economy they take place. Hence, whether the violent exchange takes place in a township or in the inner-city will animate how it will look and how those engaged in the relationship - police and policed - can negotiate it. Hence, the paper will map different forms of violent exchange in different urban contexts in the global South with empirical examples drawn from Manila, Cape Town and Johannesburg
Urban Studies seminars are sponsored by the Macfie bequest.
20 Jun 2014: Book launch: "Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging: Emotion and Location"
Time: 15:00
Venue: Room 507, Boyd Orr Building
Discussant: Alison Phipp, Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies, University of Glasgow
What does it mean to belong in a place, or more than one place? Come and explore this question and more at a seminar launching the exciting new volume, Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging: Emotion and Location. The book brings together work from interdisciplinary scholars researching home, migration and belonging, and using their original research to argue for greater attention to how feeling and emotion are deeply embedded in social structures and power relations.
Abstracts
Creeping familiarities and cosmopolitan futures
Emma Jackson, Research Fellow, Urban Studies, University of Glasgow
What does it mean to belong in a place, or more than one place? This talk introduces the book and argues for a practical cosmopolitanism that recognises relations of power and struggle, and that struggles over place are often played out through emotional attachment.
Uncomfortable Feelings: How local belonging works on local policy makers
Hannah Jones, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Warwick
This talk considers how local government policy makers recognise and negotiate multiple experiences and representations of their locality, to construct narratives of local multiculture within and against national and international imaginaries and restrictions. The research is based on interviews in four areas of England: Hackney, often seen as a successful example of 'super-diversity', over-writing memories of a more troubled past; Oldham, often used as a byword for 'race riots' in 2001 and 'parallel lives' lived by Asian and white communities; Barking and Dagenham, where the far right's electoral success has led to its characterisation as a throwback to virulent 'white working class' racism; and Peterborough, seen as an example of largely white, semi-rural England struggling to cope with new migration.
This bridge is just like the one in Visegrad?!; Dwelling, embodying and doing home across space, in the context of exile
Kristina Gronenberg, Lecturer, Center for the Study of Equality and Multiculturalism, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen
This talk addresses the ways in which a group of Bosnian households transformed space to place in the context of exile in Denmark. It is argued; that processes of homemaking took place through sensory, embodied and relational practices, which enabled processes of ‘learning to be affected’ by new socio-spatial topographies (Despret 2004). It is furthermore argued, that different household members would engage in processes of home-making in different ways, depending on the relational positioning in their households, families, and broader transnational relational networks. The article is based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork and pays attention to the everyday practices, through which Bosnians, in the specific context of exile in Denmark, negotiated the balance between having been, being and becoming in particular ways, and thus ‘get a grip’ on their lives-in-the-making.