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Philosophy of the City Conference 2021 (POTC2021)

Philosophy of the City Now: Around the World in 24 Hours

24 hours of philosophy online conference - May 17, 2021, UTC 00:00–23:59.

While only the most dedicated might be willing to join us for 24 hours, we hope that everybody will have a chance to participate in the event for a while in accordance with your local time zone. We would also like to facilitate collaboration in our global community by organizing the event in a joint manner.

We will have one main video stream with lectures and panel discussion, which will form the centre stage and the event's backbone. We will leave it to our co-hosts to add additional (hybrid) elements to the event.

About POTC

  • About the Philosophy of the City (POTC) Research Group

    The Philosophy of the City (POTC) Research  Group takes the city as an object of study, focusing on its political, social, epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, and environmental dimensions. 

    From an interdisciplinary perspective, it incorporates disciplines such as urban planning, environmental science and studies, ecology, architecture, geography, and the arts. Research questions often deal with applied philosophy and ethics, and utilize established knowledge from other areas of study. All philosophical traditions are welcome.

    The group holds a conference annually, along with sessions at the American Philosophical Association’s meetings. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in the philosophical dimensions of the city.

  • Current officers
  • Hosted conferences

    The Philosophy of the City Research Group hosted its first international event in New York in 2013. Ever since, the annual conferences and summer colloquia have been the central activities of a growing community of scholars sharing their passion for philosophy and the city.

    Conferences hosted by the Philosophy of The City Research Group include:

  • Upcoming conference

    Philosophy of the City Annual Conference 2022: 20.–22.10.2022 Turin, Italy

    In collaboration with LABONT – Center for Ontology of the University of Turin is inviting proposals for presentations at our annual conference.

    We are in the process of setting up a dedicated conference website. Submit your abstract via Easychair before June 15, 2022.

POTC 2021

  • Schedule

    All times are given as UTC +0. Please make sure that you convert the time to your own local time zone.

    We will use Zoom as the main platform. Conference attendance is free, but registration is required. Registration will remain open till the end of the conference.

    We will use breakout rooms for the smart city workshop. In other words, you will need no additional login. Just log in to the conference and choose a breakout room.

    Given the duration of the event, we will be strict on time management. By default, we will not make any programme changes due to cancellations and no-shows. Example: If the talk at 14:00 is cancelled, the next talk will start at 14:30 as planned.

    Main stage

    00:00

    Opening

    00:15

    Mao Matsuyama
    After Suburbanization - We're still living here.

    00:45

    Mami Aota
    What Do We Appreciate in Cities: Residents and Transients

    01:15

    Marie Franchesca Borras
    The Rise of the Bike Lane: Envisioning Sustainable Streets in the City

    01:45

    Melissa May F. Cardenas and Jonald John Morales
    Unpacking Enframing in a Post-Pandemic World: Masks, Single-use plastics, and Urbanization

    2:15

     

    Ragene Andrea Palma
    Embracing the ‘other’ through a city that cares:
    Recognising impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on London’s Filipino health and care community

    2:45

    BREAK

    3:15

    Andrea Baldini
    Street Art as a Subversive Urban Art Kind: On Rogue Urban Aesthetics

    3:45

    Duane Allyson Pancho
    Access, Safety, and Solidarity: Addressing Women’s Spatial Oppression

    4:15

    Gil Maymon
    Localizing Human Rights: Towards Mapping Human Rights Cities

    4:45

    Philip James Minoza
    Living in Spaces of Convenience: Spatialization and Subjectivity in Neoliberal(ized) Spaces

    5:15

    BREAK

    5:30

    Aneta Kohoutová
    Towards the perception of a town in the light of Lefevbre's triad and the pandemic situation

    6:00

    Marcel Siegler
    The Roots of Criticality: An Approach to Critical Infrastructures as Practical Ensembles

    6:30

    Rani Mandelbaum, Talia Margalit and Barbara Pizzo
    City and State in Times of Crisis: The Impact of Current Crisis Discourses on Planning Policy and Planning Democracy in Israel

    7:00

    Giovanni Frigo, Christine Milchram and Rafaela Hillerbrand
    Designing for Care

    7:30

    Claudia Westermann, Tordis Berstrand, Amir Djalali, Teresa Hoskyns, Yiping Dong, José Ángel Hidalgo Arellano, Glen Wash Ivanovic, Siti Balkish Roslan and Jiawen Han
    Dialogue on a paradise on earth

    8:00

    BREAK

    8:30

    Milos Mladenovic and Kate Pangbourne
    Contrasting governance imaginaries and possibilities for civil dissent related to emerging urban mobility technologies:
    Lessons from Hannah Arendt

    9:00

    Jessie Joshua Lino
    Confinement: Notes on the Policing of Spaces and on the Possibility of Politics

    9:30

    Joerg Fingerhut and Matthew Crippen
    Engaging our cities: The viewpoint from embodied and predictive cognition

    10:00

    Witold Wachowski
    Flowers to hide. The cognitive ecology of a disoriented city

    10:30

    Silvia Binda Heiserova
    The Vertical Order of the City: A Gender Perspective on the Urban Form

    11:00

    BREAK

    11:30

    Catherine A. Dean and Lydia W. Muthuma
    Woman as hearth of home, the basic building block of cities

    12:00

    Nicola Siddi
    Incubator cities

    12:30

    Tea Lobo
    Transcultural Perspectives on the City and the Wild

    13:00

    Sanna Lehtinen and Delfina Fantini van Ditmar
    Aesthetics of the 5G City: Conceal, Converge, Connect

    13:30

    BREAK

    14:00

    Dominique Sellier
    The Need of an urban ecosophy in a time of crises

    14:30

    Athanasios Votsis and Dina Babushkina
    Tech-reality: Cities without continuity and the human condition

    15:00

    Vladan Klement and Matthew Crippen
    Selective Permeability, Non-Subjective Relativism and Architectural Anarchy

    15:30

    Remei Capdevila-Werning
    Municipal Borders in Pandemic Times: Experiencing the City within Limits

    16:00

    Filip Senk
    Photography, imageability of architecture, and the image of the city

    16:30

    BREAK

    17:00

    Robert Seddon
    Models and Maps, Memory and Mystery

    17:30

    Mia Jaatsi
    The ethics of doing volunteer ethnography in the urban margins

    18:00

    Jonas Faria Costa and Wagner da Silva Nascimento
    The Favela and the City

    18:30

    Gerald Erion
    Philosophy and the Radiant City

    19:00

    BREAK

    19:30

    Sarah Gelbard
    Urbanist “killjoy”: complaints about progressive popular urbanism and planning

    20:00

    Scott Tate
    Social Possibility: Exploring the role of imaginative capacity for neighbourhood recovery and flourishing

    20:30

    Francisco Miguel Ortiz Delgado
    Stoic Cosmopolitanism and the Destruction of the Cities of Carthage, Tenochtitlan, and Hiroshima

    21:00

    Robert Rosenberger
    A Typology of “Hostile” Public-Space Design

    21:30

    BREAK

    21:45

    Walker Peatross
    The Failure of Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing Project as a Lesson in the Inherent Unsustainability of Austerity Politics

    22:15

    Kenneth Koenemann
    Imagining a Sustainable Approach to Combating Desertification in Las Cruces, NM

    22:45

    Maximiliano Gutierrez
    Complete Streets - Complete Citizens

    23:15

    Katherine Melcher
    Embracing Social Distance in Public Space

    23:45

    CLOSING

    Special track on Smart Cities

    We will use breakout rooms for the smart city workshop. In other words, you will need no additional login. Just log in to the conference and choose a breakout room.

    09:00

    Sage Cammers-Goodwin
    "Reading" City Behavior from a Smart Bridge

    09:30

    Milou Jansen
    AI/ML models as optimal representations of the City: Deciding what to optimize for

    10:00

    David Flood
    #Kalasatama: Digital Visual Representations and the (Re)Making of Urban Publics

    Call for local hosts: Help us in setting up a suitable infrastructure

    We are also looking for local hosts, who take care of the event in their local time-zone.

    Local hosts will:

    • Act as moderators while the event is in their time-zone,
    • Reach out to scholars in their region,
    • Participate in the review process 
    • Local hosts should be willing to chair and facilitate the meeting for 4-8 hours in their own time zone and run a Zoom meeting (as a backup for the global stream).
    • If you are interested in serving as a local host or have questions about how to approach being a local host, you can also send us questions. We will support you in this endeavour.
    • Interested? Contact for local hosts: m.h.nagenborg@utwente.nl 

    Organization Committee:

    Confirmed Local hosts:

    • Jules Simon, University of Texas at El Paso
    • Shane Epting, Missouri University of Science and Technology
    • Ronald R. Sundstrom, University of San Francisco
    • Remmon Barbaza, Ateneo de Manila University
  • Organization Committee
  • Confirmed Local hosts
    • Jules Simon, University of Texas at El Paso
    • Shane Epting, Missouri University of Science and Technology
    • Ronald R. Sundstrom, University of San Francisco
    • Remmon Barbaza, Ateneo de Manila University

Archive

Call for papers and registration information.

  • Theme and scope

    We especially invite scholars to reflect on the role of the city in the current pandemic and how our relationships with cities may change in a Post-COVID situation. This may include but is certainly not limited to topics such as "Architecture, urban planning and public health" or "Sustainable development in a time of crisis." Non-Covid related presentations are also welcome. For your inspiration, here are some potential topics:

    • Architecture, urban planning and public health
    • Sustainable development in a time of crisis
    • Issues in Housing, Transportation, Smart Cities, Infrastructure, Energy, Water and Food
    • Urban Affairs & Social Identities: Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship
    • Urban Aesthetics
    • Technology and the City
    • Urban Resilience
    • Covid, Health Equity and the City
    • Sound, Light and Sensory Landscapes in the City
  • Call for submissions

    Presentations should be approx. 20 minutes long. Q&A will be enabled via chat function or according to the moderator’s instructions. By default, all presentations should be in English, but we are open to variations. We particularly encourage submissions from graduate students and early-career researchers.

    Submit via EASY CHAIR the following:

    • Anonymized abstract
    • 300-word-max abstract (docx, otd, or pdf format) 
    • Include 5 keywords
    • Add your preferred time zone of presentation at the beginning of the abstract

    We provide you with:

    • An opportunity to meet Philosophers of the City around the globe 
    • A platform to present your recent research 
    • Discuss and communicate ideas relating to the Covid-19 pandemic in an online setting
    • Those that self-identify as junior researchers will be provided with more extensive feedback on your submission
  • Timeline
    • 22 March 2021:     Deadline for abstracts (extended)
    • 01 April 2021:        Decisions
    • 15 April 2021:        Confirmation of participation
    • 30 April 2021:        Release of the schedule
    • 17 May 2021:         24 hours of philosophy around the world
  • Call for local hosts

    Local hosts will help guide our viewers through 24 hours of philosophy. As a local host, you act as a moderator and help ensure a fluid experience while the conference is live for your time zone/region. If you are interested in serving as a local host or have questions about how to approach being a local host, you can also send us questions. We will support you in this endeavour.

    Local hosts will:

    • Act as moderators while the event is in their time-zone,
    • Reach out to scholars in their region,
    • Participate in the review process 
    • Local hosts should be willing to chair and facilitate the meeting for 4-8 hours in their own time zone and run a Zoom meeting (as a backup for the global stream).
    • If you are interested in serving as a local host or have questions about how to approach being a local host, you can also send us questions. We will support you in this endeavour.

    Interested? Contact for local hosts: m.h.nagenborg@utwente.nl