The 5th edition of  The Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies will take place at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, from 26 to 28 november. The event is organized by the Urban Transitions Hub - ICS-ULisboa and AESOP - Young Academics Network. Maan Barua (University of Cambridge) and Andrea Mubi Brighenti (University of Trento) will be the keynote speakers.

Cities have long been tied to the pursuit of a better life, from utopian visions to the contemporary promise of a freer, wealthier, and more meaningful life. Regardless of the inequality, precariousness, stress, and violence that often characterise urban existence, cities keep holding this promise, translated in a widening array of imaginaries (smart, safe, healthy, green, beautiful, creative, resilient, etc.) that feed urban policies, aesthetics and politics. Cities, however, are also quintessential sites of extraction, where this promise is constantly bent to the logics of capital, and where the value that human and nonhuman life incessantly generates is economised and sequestered through violent processes of gentrification, securitisation, touristification, or financialisation. New technologies amplify these dynamics, dramatically expanding the frontiers of value extraction while entrenching surveillance, precarious labour, and dispossession.

The complexity of this process is only partially captured by this drama of creation and dispossession, however. Before being extracted, value must be defined and measured, depending on moral ideals of what is good; cultural images of what is meaningful; ecological metrics of what is sustainable; economic imperatives of what is worth it. A wide array of indicators like liveability indexes, for instance, organise cities and neighbourhoods in simplified hierarchies that determine which spaces and lives are worth living, and which aren’t. Besides the inherent inequalities and structural blindness these charts betray, much of the value that urban dwellers daily produce fall under the radar of such institutional and epistemological regimes, with often dramatic consequences. At its core, of course, this is a question of power: who defines what counts as valuable, and who benefits from these definitions? Understanding how urban value is generated, defined, extracted or erased, therefore, is an urgent epistemological and political matter. How do contemporary processes of valuation and valorisation shape notions of urban worth, and what practices or forms of value are overlooked or excluded in these processes? How do grassroots collectives, experimental practices, and alternative valuation systems challenge or queer dominant frameworks of urban value? And, what can they reveal about overlooked economic, social, or political worth? In what ways can we speculatively reimagine urban value beyond taken-for-granted notions of liveability and habitability, while avoiding the mere romanticisation of alternatives? What methodological innovations or experimentations are needed to capture and attend to diverse forms of urban value, including non-human ones, and how might these methods resist or repurpose dominant forms of valuation? What is the urban worth, and how might we reimagine the value of urban life to support emancipatory urban futures?

These are just some among the many questions the workshop invites to engage with, encouraging participants to reflect on the role of value in shaping urban life. Open to the widest possible variety of topics or themes, we invite participants to explore the question of value conceptually, epistemologically, methodologically or politically, through the interdisciplinary lenses of urban studies, geography, spatial policy and planning, political ecology, sociology, architecture, anthropology, and beyond. We are eager to engage with projects and papers that delve into the concept of value —broadly understood—by exploring the way in which its politics, economy and aesthetics shape the contemporary urban condition.

Keynote Speakers:

The Metropolis and Metabolic Life, by Maan Barua

What does urbanization look like when we begin from contemporary alterations of metabolism, that is, biochemical, bodily and socio-political transformations brought about through the industrialization of the living and material world? Drawing on a visual ethnography of broiler chickens in India, this talk unravels relations between urbanization, economy and the more-than-human world. The 70 billion broiler chickens produced worldwide annually have a biomass three times that of all wild birds. The 465 million tonnes of feed broilers require has spurred the industrialization of entire agrarian sectors. Pollutants from the industry are major climate concerns and they have produced industrial ecosystems the world-over. By bringing these metabolic processes to the surface, the talk asks how might metabolism be grasped, what implications does this have for governing life, and where does it position understandings of a world beyond the human at the centre of its assembly.

Maan Barua works on the politics, ontologies and economies of the living and material world. His current research is on metabolic urbanization and the politics of city-making. Maan is the author of Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Plantation Worlds (Duke University Press, 2024). He was the PI on an ERC Horizon 2020 Starting Grant on Urban Ecologies, (2018-2025) and is a University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge. At present, Maan is finishing a book and visual installation on urban wetlands, provisionally titled An Amphibious Urbanism.

The alien in town. A story of value, measure, and erasure, by Andrea Mubi

This talk discusses the divergent synthesis of valorization in contemporary urbanism. Value is approached here as the big question mark of social life, so as to reconstruct how various measuring systems are devised to make value visible, to capture and funnel it. The approach taken here is therefore complementary to the theory of extractivism: where the latter shows how capitalism incorporates surplus value, the talk suggests that divergent syntheses play a role in both the creation and the ‘seizeability’ of value. An invitation is issued to develop more curiosity about the genesis of value. As a strange alien in town, value is, in the first place, uninvited and uninviting. How is it that value becomes sexy? How is it that it is recognized as valuable? The talk dives into the aesthetics and the politics of valorization, taking graffiti and other creative urban practices as case studies and illustrations.

Andrea Mubi Brighenti is Professor of Social Theory and Space & Culture at the Department of Sociology,  University of Trento, Italy. His research covers broadly space-power-and-society issues. One main thread includes visibility and visual culture; a second thread covers the territoriology and atmospherology of public space; a third thread focuses on the practices of resistance and inspiration. Recently he published (with Tali Hatuka) A New Index for Public Space (Routledge 2025), and Elias Canetti and Social Theory. The Bond of Creation (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Workshop activities include:

Plenary keynote sessions.

• Breakout parallel sessions – divided in groups, participants will present their paper and receive comments by a mentor and other participants.
• Wrap-up session with discussion on lessons learned.
• Q&A session on “academic survival” (strategies and tips for academic publishing, and post-PhD challenges).

Who can attend the workshop

• The workshop is open to PhD students and early-career scholars in the fields of urban studies, planning and geography, and all the social sciences and humanities with an interest on space.

Organising committee:

• Lavínia Pereira (coordinator, ICS-ULisboa)
• Andrea Pavoni (coordinator, DINAMIA’CET, ISCTE)
• Marco Allegra (ICS-ULisboa)
• Luisa Rossini (ICS-ULisboa)
• Simone Tulumello (ICS-ULisboa)

Mentors:

• Maan Barua (University of Cambridge, UK)
• Andrea Mubi Brighenti (University of Trento, Italy)
• Lavínia Pereira (ICS-ULisboa)
• Andrea Pavoni (DINAMIA’CET, ISCTE)
• Marco Allegra (ICS-ULisboa)
• Luisa Rossini (ICS-ULisboa)
• Simone Tulumello (ICS-ULisboa)