Workshop
Urban Materiality and Inequality - Rethinking Social and Ecological Challenges in the Global South
24-25 June 2025
This workshop renews the interest in an old link between the urban built space and social inequality. The morphology of a city, its architecture, infrastructure and urban designs all link in intricate ways to the heterogeneity of urban social life and the different people who animate it. Given the current attention to urban geographies, their predicament and potentials under the climate emergency and its unequal impact on different parts of the planet’s inhabitants, understanding this link has obtained new urgency. Urban inequality and materiality gain contours in the human and more-than-human dimensions both as relevant part of the challenges and part of possible solutions. Particular forms of urban materiality – wood and other building materials, built space, the underlying urban geography and historical sedimentations - and how they were and are handled and weaponized within logics of capitalism and extraction as well as social engineering and redistribution will be discussed within standing and new research projects.
In an interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology, architecture and urban planning, geography and cultural studies, researchers will discuss the long-standing and multiple links between materiality and inequality, how they are currently analysed, and what potentials remain for new insights and why. Given recent developments and exchanges, the workshop complements the hegemonic debates regarding cement, sand, and steel by focusing on lesser discussed, but no-less relevant materialities. Project proposal and paper presentations will explore, for example, the role of wood and woodwork in contemporary realities at the intersection of inequality and sustainability, the rural-urban, violent history of the trade in wood, the (increasingly unsuccessful) domestication of water ways as an outstanding example of unequal urban development, as well as the peri-urban where the city meets the forest and rivers. Examples draw from cities in the Global South.
If you would like to participate, please email tilmann.heil
uni-koeln.de with Workshop UrMaIn in the subject line.
Venue:
Seminar Room 3.03, Global South Studies Center
Organized by: Tilmann Heil (Glboal South Studies Center)