Urban matters

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"Urban matters" is a research collective dedicated to exploring the ways in which cities are governed, lived, transformed, and connected. Our collective brings together scholars and researchers with differing backgrounds and expertise to form an interdisciplinary forum for consolidating and learning about urban issues, and what animates contemporary discussion of world urbanisation.

There is as much variety in inhabiting urban worlds as there is in conducting urban research. A city is never something unique, specific, or characteristic, but rather a collection of messy, complex practices and parts that never come together as a whole. Our collective inquiry asks how we can understand cities as relational –and post-relational–, and seeks to explore the various ways in which we might consider urban worlds to become whole: as experiments, paradoxes, operations, or tensions resonating across multiple terrains that express meaning and matter in urban spaces.

The main objective of our research collective is then to offer a space for encompassing multiple backgrounds, methods and theorisations. We attempt to assemble urban knowledge out of existing forms of theorising, while the collective also provides a setting for experimentation with what might be urban knowledge: how to envision new directions for exchange and to generate new opportunities for concept reinterpretation, methodological interventions, and empirical re-descriptions.

Our mode of work is based upon four types of interventions (colloquia, research seminars, discussion groups, movie screenings) and two formats of presentation (workshops and lecture series).