Reorienting the Euro-centric bias in planning and urban studies

Urban Salon hosted the launch of the new edited collection Urban Geopolitics: Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities on 20 November at UCL. Edited by Jonathan Rokem (UCL Geography) and Camillo Boano (The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL / Urban Lab), the book moves away from loosely defined urban theories and contexts, and argues it is time to start learning from and compare across different 'contested cities'.

Frequently, comparative research in urban studies is based on similar case studies on a few selected cities in America and Europe and all too often focus on the abstract city level with marginal attention given to particular local contexts. This book questions the long-standing Euro-centric academic knowledge production by bringing together a diverse range of international case studies from Latin America, South and South East Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East, with in-depth studies of the worldwide contested nature of cities.

A blog by Audrey Robeson (UCL Urban Studies MSc student) highlighting the discussions at the launch has been published on UCL's Events blog.

Audio from the event is also available to listen to via the UCL Urban Laboratory's SoundCloud page.

The book launch was hosted by the Urban Salon, with the financial support of UCL Urban Laboratory and The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL.

• UCL Event blog on the Urban Geopolitics launch
• Launch event on Soundcloud

Image credit: Evelyn Teh on Twitter