A 5ª edição da The Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies terá lugar no Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, de 26 a 28 de novembro. O evento é organizado pelo Urban Transitions Hub do ICS-ULisboa e AESOP - Young Academics Network. Maan Barua (University of Cambridge) e Andrea Mubi Brighenti (University of Trento) serão os oradores principais.

  Public Keynote Sessions

           26 Nov. 17:00, Sala Maria de Sousa 

           Maan Barua, The Metropolis and Metabolic Life

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.

           27 Nov. 18:00, Sala Maria de Sousa

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

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).

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