In this guest post, Dr Isolde de Villiers, Dr Yimin Zhao, and Dr Erwin Nugraha share their experiences from a series of seminars focused on Overlooked Cities, supported by a USF Seminar Series Award. The seminars explored the dynamics and challenges of often-overlooked urban areas in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the UK, through interdisciplinary discussions, mentorship for early career researchers, and reflections on urban power relations and spatial justice.
The Overlooked Cities: Thinking and Doing Global Urban Studies Differently hosted three seminars in three different overlooked cities in Southeast Asia, Africa and the United Kingdom, respectively. With funding from the Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Awards, the Overlooked Cities Collective (the collective) could host the three seminars, engage a large number of academics and practitioners, build a valuable network and forge a new research agenda. One was in Bandung in September 2023, one was in Bloemfontein in October 2023, and one was in Durham in June 2024. These seminars were all very well attended. The collective consists of Isolde de Villiers, Yimin Zhao, Erwin Nugraha, Hanna Ruszczyk and Julia Wesely.
The first event was a three-day conference entitled Overlooked Cities in Asia: Interrogating blind fields in urban knowledges and praxes, 6-8 September 2023, in Bandung, Indonesia. The conference included the culmination of an Early Career Researcher (ECR) mentorship programme, which kicked off in May 2023. The collective received a vast number of applications for the ECR mentorship programme, and after a careful selection process, 15 ECR’s were identified. They could submit drafts of their conference papers to mentors and receive feedback during workshops scheduled throughout the year. The ECRs each received a bursary to cover some of their costs to attend the conference and presented their work during the conference. The ECR mentors and keynote speakers were Hyun Bang Shin (London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE, UK), Rita Padawangi (Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore), and AbdouMaliq Simone (Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, UK). It was a multi-disciplinary conference with different paper presentations, presentations from practice, short films, and artworks that were displayed. The conference ended with a site visit to an open-air cinema built under an overbridge as well as an urban farm in Bandung. The conference dinner with 50 delegates chatting away at two long tables was definitely a highlight.
The second event took the form of a hybrid colloquium at the University of the Free State, also the host institution of the grant funding, in Bloemfontein in October 2023. “Ordinary and overlooked cities in conversation”. The two keynote speakers were Jennifer Robinson (University College London, UK), Ivan Turok (University of the Free State, South Africa), and Stephan de Beer (University of Pretoria, South Africa). The two-day colloquium covered 24 presentations and close to 100 attendees registered to attend online. Sessions included: Ordinary cities in dialogue, Spatial justice and overlooked cities, and unheard narratives. The colloquium ended with a spatial justice tour of Bloemfontein that zoomed in on the remains of the Apartheid city. The group visited a site where two informal settlements were separated by a busy provincial road, and community members formed ad-hoc traffic regulation teams. Naval Hill is also a site from which the buffer zones and other remnants of the city’s divided past are clearly visible.
The third event in the seminar series took place in Durham from 10 to 11 June 2024. The purpose of the Durham event was to reflect on the first two events (in Bandung, Indonesia and Bloemfontein, South Africa) and to consider what now, where do we go from here? We no longer need to say that overlooked cities matter (Ruszczyk et al., 2021; Nugraha et al., 2022). In the emerging research of the collective on overlookedness, there is a sensibility, an act of care. This final event underlined our belief that there needs to be a particular focus on relations between cities and within cities, as well as the power relations in urban spaces. It underscored the need to continue to push to do research differently. Further research areas for the collective include:
- How do we do the looking, what are our methodological approaches?
- Could we look through narratives, longitudinal studies, through storytelling?
- How can we expand our conversations beyond academia, such as engaging with CSOs / NGOs?
- How do we make a space for the organisations who are doing the work while also exploring how they make a space for us?
The questions that were posed to those who were invited to the event, but also to those collaborators who will join the collective are:
- How do we address the fact that, at times, people want to be overlooked, that they do not want to draw attention to their actions?
- Can we collaborate in comparison, how do we do this with dialogue in mind?
- How do we not obscure urban logics without re-categorizing?
- What are the other concepts we should be in conversation with?
In addition to the valuable theoretical and academic explorations, the seminar series awarded us an opportunity to reflect on what it means to host an event in an overlooked city. As a collective, and with the funding from the USF, we hosted three seminars. Without funding, these seminars would never have taken place on these sites.
Hosting in an overlooked city means longer travel times for delegates. In addition to long international flights to and from main centres, there had to be local flights, in the case of Bloemfontein, or airport transfers, in the case of Bandung. These flights and transfers are not as reliable, either because they serve non-main nodes and the aircraft tend to be smaller, or because of traffic in developing countries. Furthermore, in Bloemfontein, for example, there are no restaurants open on a Sunday after 15:00, so special catering had to be arranged for guests. There is no Uber or other e-hailing transport option in Bloemfontein, and no public transport, except for minibus taxis, which travel on pre-determined routes and, therefore, not to the airport. A shuttle service had to be booked in advance, delegates were transported by the organisers and other local delegates. We believe that these locations allowed for and urged different conversations to take place.