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Aspirational Urbanism and the Recodification of Defiance (ASPIRA)
We are excited to announce that Dr. Julie Ren (University of Amsterdam) has been awarded an SNF Starting Grant for her project “Aspirational Urbanism and the Recodification of Defiance (ASPIRA)”. The SNSF Grant will begin January 2025 and is hosted by Urban Studies at the University of Basel.
The function of a blank sheet of A4 paper in a context of censorship reflects the need to recognize new forms of defiance. As speech is being monitored through different technologies and in a range of arenas from the public square to social media and across university campuses, defiance takes new forms of symbolic critique. In the project “Aspirational Urbanism and the Recodification of Defiance (ASPIRA), recognizing defiance contributes to the aim of conceptualizing aspirational urbanism as a way of understanding the function of alterity (alternative futures, speculative possibilities) in shaping cities. Rather than explaining urban change in Hong Kong and Taipei exclusively in terms of Tiger economics or the developmentalist state, beyond techno-positivism and growth machine dogmas, ASPIRA recognizes defiance as the agency of urban residents in contesting perceived inevitabilities. The project builds on theoretical work on urban futures, understanding cities as sites for planning, imagining and representing futures. It also recognizes the unequal capacities and risks involved, highlighting the “cruel” ascriptions to optimism and the potentially devastating consequences of aspiration. ASPIRA’s approach identifying defiance by centering on visual analysis grounds aspirational urbanism, rescaling the object of urban theory towards everyday micro-practices. The SNSF Starting Grant project will begin January 2025 and is hosted by the Urban Studies Unit at the University of Basel.
Julie Ren is Assistant Professor of Urban Geography, University of Amsterdam and book forum editor at the journal Urban Geography. She has held postdoctoral posts at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, London School of Economics, the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Zurich, where she completed her habilitation. Her research on art events and spaces has used comparative urbanism as a means to contribute to a more global urban theory. Her latest book is Engaging Comparative Urbanism: Art Spaces in Beijing and Berlin (Bristol University Press, 2021).