This seminar series is being hosted by the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities and the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society

Speaker: Professor Jennifer Robinson, Department of Geography, University College London

Abstract: Under conditions of globalisation, city futures are imagined in the context of a wider world of cities: policy making for cities is profoundly internationalised. And in the wake of vast changes where urbanisation is taking place across the globe, scholars must now theorise the contemporary urban condition with reference to a world of diverse cities. Both require new vocabularies and new ways of working with traces of elsewhere as city futures are re-imagined: for policy makers to operate at the complex interface between circulating policies and local political contestations, and for scholars to revitalise and invent comparative and international ways of doing research.

Biography: Professor Jennifer Robinson has published widely in urban geography: on the politics of segregation in South African cities (The Power of Apartheid, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996), on urban development in post-apartheid cities, and, more generally, her book, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (Routledge: 2006) established a post-colonial critique of urban studies, arguing for urban theory to draw on the diversity of urban experiences across the globe in developing more general accounts of cities.