The Cambridge City Seminar Series

The City Seminar Series 2024-2025 seeks out those who engage with creative and critical approaches to research-practice, transdisciplinary and collaborative processes, and relational methods. During Michaelmas 2024, we welcome scholars from a variety of disciplines to share work that pushes the boundaries of dominant narratives of the urban.

Across multiple talks we will engage with topics ranging from Action Research in the Digital Economy, to Democratising Planning and Empowering Communities, Informational Peripheries, Urban Informality, and Living the Urban Periphery. With this series we hope to engage an imaginging otherwise and to inspire critical dialogue towards understanding the urban in its relationality.

The following talks for the City Seminar Series will take place at 5.30pm in Lecture Room 1, Scroope Terrace, Cambridge CB2 1PX (unless stated otherwise).

An Amphibious Urbanism

Maan Barua (University of Cambridge) 

This talk will be held on March 18th from 17:30-19:00 in Lecture Room 2, Scroope Terrace (Department of Architecture), with refreshments served following the Q&A.

Please register at: Maan Barua - Amphibious Urbanism

About the talk:

What might the urban become if one challenged the proposition that cities are equated with land? How might urban theory be done differently if wetness was brought into centre stage in the politics of habitation? Starting from Guwahati, a city of 1.2 million people in northeast India that constitutes the South within the Global South, this talk furnishes the outlines of an amphibious urbanism: a recalibration of urbanicity by interrogating life (bios) from the wet surrounds (amphi-). Three cuts into the amphibious are presented: (1) plotting, rather than planning, as the idiom of city-making; (2) incompletion contra built form as a feature of urban ontology; and (3) dispossession by accumulation, and not just accumulation by dispossession, as a material condition of extended urbanisation. These themes are drawn together to interrogate a future urban condition. The talk draws from a book and visual project steeped in ethnographic endeavour.

Contact ds2079@cam.ac.uk, if you have any questions.