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Public Lecture: The production of informal space
01 December 2022, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm
We are thrilled to warmly welcome all back to campus to join us for our second Public Lecture of the 2022-23 series.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Victoria Howard
Location
-
Roberts G06Gower StreetLondonWC1H0NNUnited Kingdom
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Roberts Foyer.
Contemporary Italy is characterized by a plethora of informal/illegal housing practices: occupation of public housing units, unauthorized constructions in coastal areas, illegal subdivision of agricultural land, precarious settlements by ethnic minorities, and real estate development by criminal organisations. Despite their differences, all of these practices are characterised by complex connections with a variety of public institutions, which, in different ways, favour and shape such production of informal space.
The analysis of the Italian case is the starting point to rethink some aspects of the debate on urban informality (e.g. the unsatisfactory geographical conceptualisation of the phenomenon) and, at the same time, to clarify the epistemological contribution of informality to understanding some of the constituent characters of contemporary urbanism (e.g., the archipelago of unequal urban citizenship and the hidden politics of in/formality).
About the Speaker
Francesco Chiodelli
Associate Professor of Urban and Legal Geography at University of Turin, Italy
Francesco's research lies at the intersection of urban space and institutions. He is mainly working on housing informality in Southern Europe and on different manifestations of illegality in the urban sphere. On these topics, he published several articles on renowned international journals and he co-edited 'The Illicit and Illegal in Regional and Urban Governance and Development. Corrupt Places' (Routledge, 2018). He also investigated the spatial dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over Jerusalem, on which he published 'Shaping Jerusalem. Spatial planning, politics and the conflict (Routledge, 2017)'.