Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies

UrbanoScenes Seminar Series #8

8 November 2023, 15:00-16:30

ICS-ULisboa, Sala Maria de Sousa

Michele Lancione

Politecnico di Torino

www.beyondinhabitation.org

The impossible possibility of ‘home’

What does it mean to be at 'home', when 'home' itself is the expression of structural forms of violence, at the intersection of anthropocentrism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and racial capitalism? As the COVID-19 pandemic showed, home can be read as a juncture where many of the inequalities of our time come and are held together structurally; yet, at the same time, home maintains an attractive lure to itself, as a place one is called to defend or to work toward, in order to be freed from subjections that seem to render home impossible in the first place. In this talk, my aim is to stay close to this only apparent contradiction, which I would like to name the “impossible possibility of home.” With this notion, I interpret the unjust and violent foundations of home not as opposite to, but as foundational to, its capacity to allude to one’s own betterment in terms of belonging, security, and care. This means to say that the lure of home as a space of belonging is emerging from the foundations of home itself, rather than being a means toward salvation from its violence. The impossible possibility of home lies in home’s capacity to sell a diagram of liberation as a line of flight, a breakthrough from its unjust underpinnings, while in immanent, lived, and felt terms, that diagram is a very powerful function of those.

9 November 2023, 17:00-18:30

ICS-ULisboa, Sala Maria de Sousa

Stephanie Wakefield

Florida Atlantic University

Urban Inhabitation in the Anthropocene

The 21st century is developing as a multipolar battle over how and where life on Earth can and should be lived, what forms of inhabitation are possible and desirable. For the last decade, resilience has dominated urban planning, design, critical theory, and art, infusing each with eco-cybernetic visions of cities as coupled social, ecological, and technological infrastructural systems and human life as that which survives shocks and stresses while maintaining its essential parameters. Meanwhile, emergent notions of climate refuge urbanism being sketched out across American media, planning, and governmental discourse focus not on securing existing spaces and modes of urban life, but pre-emptively dismantling them and relocating residents to cooler Northern cities. Across these distinct but related urban imaginaries, inhabitation is increasingly conflated with survival amidst permacrisis. But, I argue, inhabitation is far more than this: it is the critical cosmotechnical capacity by which free human beings destitute the conditions into which they are thrown and, in the process, construct a life and a world beyond survival. Although this capacity is the very thing which many urban planners, designers, and critical thinkers now imagine as impossible, an obsolete relic of the Holocene whose conditions of existence are passing away, might this denial of inhabitation itself be the very apparatus against which urban thinkers and designers must push, indeed reject and refuse? And if so, what conceptual and practical tools can be found in the present for this project?

Funding: FCT (UrbanoScenes project: PTDC/GES-URB/1053/2021) and Research Group SHIFT