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The Comparative Gesture: Jennifer Robinson and Christian Schmid

Discussion

March 31, 2025
12-1:30pm

Taubman College Commons
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
2000 Bonisteel Blvd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109





A discussion with Jennifer Robinson and Christian Schmid about their recent books on urban comparative research, with particular focus on African cities.

Jennifer Robinson is Professor of Human Geography, University College London, UK. She is the author of Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (2006), a seminal work which developed a postcolonial critique of urban studies, and Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies (2023). The latter book proposes grounds for reformatting comparative urban practice and offers a wide range of tactics for researching global urban experiences. Her empirical research in South Africa examined the history of apartheid cities and the politics of post-apartheid city-visioning, while her comparative research has considered urban development politics in London, Shanghai and Johannesburg, and transnational circuits shaping African urbanization.

Christian Schmid is an urban researcher, geographer and sociologist, Professor of Sociology, Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. He is a is a member of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA). His research focuses on planetary urbanization, comparative urban analysis and theories of urbanization and of space. His recent books include Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet: Theory Building through Comparison (ed. with Monika Streule), which rethinks cartography as an instrument for the analysis of urbanization processes (2023), and Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space (2022), a reconstruction of Lefebvre's theory of space and of the urban.


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