DISRUPTING NEOLIBERAL URBAN GOVERNANCE: NEW ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS FOR THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE WITH DAVID HARVEY, MIGUEL ROBLES-DURAN, LAIA FORNE, GALA PIN, AND LAURA RAICOVICH

Urban Front collaborated in Jeanne van Heeswijk’s Training for the Not-Yet XVIII on December 5, 2019 at BAK in Utrecht, The Netherlands. This training called for the urgent formation of what Urban Front calls “parallel urban practices,” while taking aim at the structural and conceptual problem of contemporary urbanism: the increasing fragmentation, separation, and disintegration of an understanding of the city. This fragmentation indicates the lack of a unifying theory or coherent body of knowledge about how urban space is used and produced by capitalism. Against architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and other established disciplines that fragment the built environment; and against all established disciplinary specializations that dispossess non-privileged communities of their right to know and decide about their environment, the training proposed a radical re-imagination of the intellectual division of labor that dominates the production of cities under contemporary capitalism.

The training also provided overviews on understanding relational urbanization processes; on how to build and transfer trans-disciplinary knowledge; and on dialectical thinking, and historical and geographical materialist inquiry, along with discussions on innovative and experimental social interventions and practices in New York, Barcelona, Puerto Rico, and Quito, where learning from the community and engaged experience has made it possible to construct anti-capitalist interventions that integrate a wide range of public and private actors. For more information, please take a look here.

Photo: Disrupting Neoliberal Urban Governance: New Organizational Forms for the Immediate Future, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 4–5 December 2019. Photographer: Janneke Absil.