Urban Life at the Extensions
The Institute in Paris is delighted to welcome Professor AbdouMaliq Simone, who will be taking up the third iteration of the Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship, an opportunity for comparative and collective work in Urban Studies established with the support of the Banister Fletcher Trust and in collaboration with the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and the School of History (QMUL).
Content Directory:
- Introduction
- Programme
- Professor AbdouMaliq Simone
Urban Life at the Extensions: Introduction
Professor Simone’s Fellowship Programme is entitled Urban Life at the Extensions. It will engage in collaborative work with the Beyond Inhabitation Lab and a number of frontline associations and networks in the Paris area to build a series of seminars and joint investigations.
Professor AbdouMaliq Simone's conceptual programme begins with the question incumbent in engagements with “the urban” as to who can act, who is endowed with the sensate capacities, why has agency and affect become the purview of only certain “actors” and not others, and thus a sense of urban power constructed on the basis of a limited assignation of agential performance? Why sustain a bifurcation among human, built, technical, and social domains, for are not these identifications themselves urbanized to assume a multiplicity of collective actions? How then to inhabit a pluriversal urban terrain?
It will engage the notion of ‘extension’ and ‘extensions’ in ways that themselves exceed the focus on extension beyond city form to suggest that going beyond can take place anywhere and is manifested not only in new territorial formations but also in ways of living and inhabiting.
Extensions draw attention to intensive entanglements across different locations, to different ways of living, different games of getting by, different logics and identities of what any given place might be. Extensions as augmentations of urban information processes, decision support systems, territorial management, surveillance and control, as well as the unforeseen ways in which urban spaces can offer inexplicable affordances. This is not only about seeking to overthrow the current system by suggesting new models or imposing utopian visions. It is about extending the possibilities for putting existing materials to new uses.
Urban Life at the Extensions: Programme
The programme will draw together five thematic working strands in an intensive 5-day series of ‘dialogues’ convened in Paris at the Institute and at the Station-Gare des Mines (Aubervilliers), and led by scholars, activists and urbanists drawing from their respective domains and locations. Please view programme overview and details below.
Dates: Monday 17 April-Friday 21 April 2023
1. On Habitability—Propositions Beyond Capture
9:30-12:30
For a future urban politics the need is to circumvent the tyranny of the systematic, the resilient, the humanitarian, and the metabolic (the predominant metaphors of habitability), and to focus on the propositional politics emerging from the grounds from which inhabitation is contested, in its embodied everyday assemblages.
Here we are interested in habitability as a process: roads, buildings, pipes, wires, animals, viruses, humans feeling each other out, and the ways their alliances are conjoined as more than one and less than two—each folding the other in without being completely subsumed. As Brian Massumi has indicated, each occasion of sensing, of apprehension, always proposes for the world a surplus of patterned potential, a surplus of sensibility, a way of taking the combinations of the past and finding within them the potential of the recombinant—for sociality is always a matter of recomposing, recombining.
Read more here.
2. Extensions within and beyond home
14:00-17:30
In this session we present a reading of home and housing not as a 'thing', but as material-affective extension of wider economies, ecologies and histories. The invitation is to take 'homing' in its intersectional and relational nature, as a politics that exceeds what decades of 'housing' scholarship and policy approaches have made of it. Our invitation is to take the 'house' beyond policy, to excavate its urban extensions and their political meaning.
Read more here.
Followed by welcome drinks at the Ƶ Institute in Paris
1. Extensions of and beyond the notions of suburbs, peripheries, diasporas - Part I
9:30-12:30
These notions of suburbs, hinterlands, peripheries, diasporas conventionally point to an outside, a volatile frontier, and sometimes something out of place, something that needs to be settled. For their social and material compositions are frequently viewed to belie an unsettling process, or alternately, an escape from the densities of the city. How might we extend their unsettling dimensions in generative ways, and yet go beyond that, to think of these things in their own provisional terms?
Read more here.
2. Experiments on uncertain terrain: extensions as re-composition
15:00-18:00
Diverse geographies are replete with different forms and practices of experimentation. How to get the most from what is available; how to use it as a means of both consolidating positions and using it as an instrument to exceed to those positions, participate in other ways of being in the world? Given the countervailing pressures of intense fragmentation, the fractal replication of hegemonic forms of living, the subsumption of heterogeneous ways of living under the dominant rubrics of capital, the expansionisms of logistical operations, what is capable of holding things together in some kind of coherence?
Read more here.
Followed by an apéritif and film-screening « Vorrei Tanto Tornare A Casa", Anna Rispoli (TBC)
1. Extensions of and beyond the notions of suburbs, peripheries, diasporas - Part II
9.30-12.30
These notions of suburbs, hinterlands, peripheries, diasporas conventionally point to an outside, a volatile frontier, and sometimes something out of place, something that needs to be settled. For their social and material compositions are frequently viewed to belie an unsettling process, or alternately, an escape from the densities of the city. How might we extend their unsettling dimensions in generative ways, and yet go beyond that, to think of these things in their own provisional terms?
Read more here.
2. Extensions of and beyond the concept of blackness - Part I
14:00-17:30
Taking into consideration black social reproduction—as consistently unsettled by institutionalized anti-blackness and black attempts to autonomously create legacies, conveyances, and potentials within structures of racial oppression, what constitutes black well-being. Does such black well-being need to considered in terms different to those now normatively applied? Is there something about the very being of blackness that is required to formulate any viable concept of well-being, as applied to black populations or any population?
Read more here.
Followed by Open Studios: Art practices and their urban extensions
Moderators: Asha Best and Rupali Gupte
Featuring Jean-Christophe Lanquetin of Play>Urban
Cité internationale des arts, 18 Rue de l'Hôtel de ville
19.00
1. Extensions of and beyond the concept of blackness - Part II
9.30-12.30
Taking into consideration black social reproduction—as consistently unsettled by institutionalized anti-blackness and black attempts to autonomously create legacies, conveyances, and potentials within structures of racial oppression, what constitutes black well-being. Does such black well-being need to considered in terms different to those now normatively applied? Is there something about the very being of blackness that is required to formulate any viable concept of well-being, as applied to black populations or any population?
Read more here.
2. Comparative work on life at the extensions
15.00-18.00
With the multifaceted considerations developed over the preceding days, the Urban Extensions collective plus guest will discuss how extensions become a conceptual vehicle to exceed the bifurcations of urban space, its residual anchorage in divisions between the material and immaterial, the built and social environments, official and popular economies. The question will be how it can be used a means of constituting a different sense of things.
Read more here.
Dinner and fundraising party for the Coucou crew with the artists Heimat (live), Bernardino Femminielli (Live), Winter Family (live) and more to be announced, 18.00-00.00.
1. Dhanveer Singh Brar - Unhoused Music
16.00-18.00
in conversation with AbdouMaliq Simone, organised by Eugene Brennan
Dhanveer Singh Brar, the author of (Goldsmiths Press), presents an examination of the site specificity of musical genre. Techno, for example, has been discursively linked to Detroit (and a defined Detroit Techno sound) while House has been linked to Chicago (and a Chicago House sound) but such narratives of site specificity can be limiting and overlook the circulations of those who generated the music. Following DJ Lynée Denise’s productive unsettling of House music as singularly located, Brar’s talk asks: how do we go about hearing house? How do we go about encountering it? What does it tell us of its conditions?
Read more here.
Professor AbdouMaliq Simone
Professor Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at The Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, co-director of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab of the Polytechnic University of Turin, and has held research positions at the Max Planck Institute, the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, the Rujak Centre for Urban Studies in Jakarta and at the University of Tarumanagara. He is also the author of many ground-breaking works, including most recently (2022).
The range and processes that Professor Simone’s work has engaged and developed constitutes a fantastic basis from which to contribute to the Banister Fletcher Fellowship’s objectives of placing alternative forms and spaces of knowledge production at the heart of the work it aims to foster in relation to cultures and histories of the built environment across the world. And we look forward very much to working with Professor Simone to these ends.