Moving In and Around the City: Mobilities, Circulation, and Uncertainty

Workshop hosted by LSE Cities

This workshop brought together diverse case studies which explore physical circulations in and around the city. From everyday movements of urban residents to the more exceptional mobilities of migrants, the workshop generated interdisciplinary conversations around mobility, circulation, and urban uncertainty. In particular, we highlighted the possible ways in which urban residents may respond to conditions of uncertainty through mobile practices, how issues such as security, emergency, and crisis may structure governmental agendas around managing urban mobilities, and how emerging mobilities and their governance may affect urban futures.

The Urban Uncertainty workshop series is an integral part of LSE Cities’ collaborative investigation into emerging ways of envisioning and governing the future of cities. Each session focuses on a different dimension of urban uncertainty, from health and housing to crime and climate, and brings together scholars from a handful of disciplines whose work converges on common themes.

Profiles

Ali Abdul Kadir Ali

Ali is a Post-Doctoral Research Officer in the Department of International Development at the LSE. His current research investigates the Syrian conflict and its implications for society. He has examined governance in ‘rebel-held’ areas; ICT tools and the security of activists in Syria; displacement; and the political economy of war emerging in the country. Ali’s PhD examined decision making processes in the forced migration of Iraqis who endured military occupation; the conceptualisation of forced migration; the relationship between displacement and transformations of the state; and war’s coercive transformations of space.
Hanna Baumann

Hanna Baumann is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, where she also convenes the biweekly City Seminar. Her doctoral research is concerned with the politics of Palestinian mobility in and around East Jerusalem.
Javier Caletrío

Javier Caletrío is based at the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University and is scientific advisor to the Mobile Lives Forum (Paris). His research interests are inequality, mobility and climate change. Recent publications include Living in Cities (Working Paper for the UK Government Foresight Programme on Future of Cities, with John Urry, Thomas Birtchnell, and Serena Pollastri) and an edited book on Elite Mobilities (with Thomas Birtchnell). Since 2000 he has conducted extensive research on environmental change in the Mediterranean.
Jonathan Darling

Jonathan Darling has been at the University of Manchester since 2009, when he was appointed as Lecturer in Human Geography. Prior to that he worked at the University of St Andrews as a Teaching Fellow in Geography following a BA, MA and PhD in Geography from Durham University. Jonathan carries out research on the politics of asylum and forced migration and has interests in urban, political and cultural geography.
Claudio Sopranzetti

Claudio Sopranzetti is a Postdoctoral Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. He received his PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 2013 with a dissertation titled "The Owners of the Map: mobility and politics among motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok." He is also the author of "Red Journeys: inside the Thai Red Shirts movement," an ethnographic account of the 2010 protest in the Thai capital.