Catastrophic Urbanism: Disaster, Emergency, Cities

An event hosted by LSE Cities

This workshop on disaster, emergency, and the city explores the force of catastrophic events—actual and potential, real and imagined, past and future—across the domains of politics and governance, the built environment, popular culture, and everyday life.

The Urban Uncertainty workshop series is an integral part of LSE Cities’ collaborative investigation into emerging ways of envisioning and governing the future of cities. Each session focuses on a different dimension of urban uncertainty, from health and housing to crime and climate, and brings together scholars from a handful of disciplines whose work converges on common themes.

Event materials

Profiles

    Peter Adey

    Peter Adey is a Reader in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests orbit around three main empirical and conceptual sites of enquiry: the airport/border; the vertical territorial and material spaces of air; and the political and technological spaces of emergency and evacuation.

    Ben Anderson

    Ben Anderson is a Reader in Human Geography at Durham University. His current research focuses on how networked urban life is governed in and through emergency, with particular emphasis on “rapid response,” “early warning” and other ways of dealing with actual or potential disruptions.

    Claudia Aradau

    Claudia Aradau is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research focuses on practices of governing (in)security, risk and anticipatory knowledge.

    Monika Büscher

    Monika Büscher is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. She studies mobile work, often in the context of interdisciplinary socio-technical innovation, and is leading research on the social, legal, and ethical implications of IT supported emergency response for the BRIDGE project.

    Joe Deville

    Joe Deville is a postdoctoral researcher based at the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently working on the ERC funded “Organizing Disaster” project while writing a book on consumer credit default and debt collection.

    Kevin Grove

    Kevin Grove is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University. His research bridges political geography and political ecology to study how societies are governed through social and ecological uncertainty.