+++Public lecture | Book presentation+++
TCR Talks – Winter Semester 24
Towards New Vocabularies of Urbanisation
By: Prof. Dr. Christian Schmid
Date: Monday, 2 December 2024
Time: 11:00–12:30
Place: Chair and Institute for Urban Design, SG301, Wüllnerstr. 5b, 52062 Aachen
Summary: The speed, scale and scope of urbanisation have increased dramatically in recent decades. To decipher the rapidly changing urban territories across the planet, we need a radical shift in the analytical perspective on urbanisation. This contribution presents an expanded vocabulary of urbanisation processes through a comparison of Tokyo, Hong Kong–Shenzhen–Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City and Los Angeles. It proposes a series of new concepts that allow us to assess the practical consequences of different urban strategies in everyday life.
This contribution is based on a transdisciplinary research project that is published in Christian Schmid and Monika Streule (eds): Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet (Birkhäuser, Basel 2023, open access).
Speaker: Christian Schmid is a geographer und urban researcher. He is Professor for Sociology at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich. His scientific work is on planetary urbanisation, on comparative urban analysis, and on theories of urbanisation and of space. He is a founding member of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA). He wrote an encompassing reconstruction of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space published by Verso in 2022. Together with architects Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili and Pierre de Meuron he co-authored the book “Switzerland: An Urban Portrait” (2006), a pioneering analysis of extended urbanisation. He is also the co-editor of two recently published books on planetary urbanisation: “Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet: Theory Building through Comparison” (together with Monika Streule), on urbanisation processes in eight large metropolitan territories; and “Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles” (together with Milica Topalović), presenting case studies in very different territories of extended urbanisation across the globe.
Photograph: Dominique Meienberg
