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Peripheral Urbanisation

Public lecture of the LSE Cities public lectures series hosted by LSE Cities

Many cities around the world have been largely auto-constructed by their residents. Peripheral urbanisation refers to these auto-constructed modes of production of urban space that have three main defining characteristics. First, they operate with a specific temporality: they are long-term processes that create spaces that are always in the making. Second, they frequently unsettle official logics of legal property, formal labour, state regulation, and market capitalism. Nevertheless, they do not contest these logics directly as much as operate with them in transversal ways. Third, they generate new modes of politics through practices that produce new kinds of citizens, claims, circuits, and contestation. Cities produced through peripheral urbanisation are usually highly unequal and the quality of different sections of the urban space varies considerably. They are also perennially transforming themselves.

In this talk, Teresa Caldeira explores the main characteristics of processes of peripheral urbanisation and discusses some of the ways in which they have been transformed recently, both by gentrification and by the introduction of large scale production of low income housing for the market.

Free and open to the public, no booking necessary.

Image: Paolo Rosselli

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  • Teresa Caldeira

    Teresa Caldeira is Professor of City & Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on predicaments of urbanisation and reconfigurations of spatial segregation and social discrimination, mostly in cities of the global south. She has been studying the relationships between urban form and political transformation, particularly in the context of democratisation. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining methodologies, theories, and approaches from the different social sciences, and especially concerned with reshaping ethnographic methods for the study of cities. She is the author of City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo.

     

  • Ricky Burdett

    Ricky Burdett

    Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age programme. His research interests focus on the interactions between the physical and social worlds in the contemporary city and how urbanisation affects social and environmental sustainability. He was Chief Adviser on Architecture and Urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics and architectural adviser to the Mayor of London from 2001 to 2006.