The 7th Wittrock Lecture – “Future Foreclosed: Urban Time and the Politics of Urban Incipience”
- Date: 21 March 2025, 13:15
- Location: SCAS, Thunberg Lecture Hall, Linneanum, Villavägen 6c, Uppsala
- Type: Lecture
- Lecturer: Ash Amin, Emeritus 1931 Chair of Geography, University of Cambridge
- Web page
- Organiser: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS)
- Contact person: Sandra Rekanovic
Ash Amin will give the 7th Wittrock Lecture on “Future Foreclosed: Urban Time and the Politics of Urban Incipience”. The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion on the topic “Futuring Urban Lives: Foreclosures, Openings, and Contestations”. Panellists: Ash Amin, Ayse Caglar, Jennifer Mack & Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus. Moderator: Anders Ekström. Hybrid event. Pre-registration is required. See the website for further information (including registration form and Zoom link)
ABSTRACT:
What are the foreshadows of urban time, the remainders that subvert the intended? This is a question worth asking as the lives of majorities are increasingly put at risk by multiple hazards and moves by those in power to repossess the urban commons. There is a futurity of urban foreclosure and dispossession unfolding. Yet, following Agamben’s characterisation of the contemporary as untimely, as a nick in time between the already and yet to come, and given the history of cities as brecciations of all manner of debris and knowledge from the past seeping into the present, there may be other temporal tendencies lingering. In its abandonment, life in the foreshadows of makeshift relations and survivalist care in artisanal habitats may hold some promise, resting on the incipience of always necessary connecting and experimenting in foregoing. How to acknowledge this incipience without romance, to name the conditions of its announcement of another urban future?