Philosophy of the City Conference 2021 (POTC2021)

Monday 17 May 2021

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

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.
- Shane Epting, Codirector
- Ronald R. Sundstrom, Codirector
- Michael Nagenborg, Codirector
- Jules Simon, Codirector
- Sanna Lehtinen, Codirector
- Judith Green, Executive Committee Member
- David Woods, Executive Committee Member
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:
- Philosophy of the City 2020, Warsaw, Poland
- Philosophy of The City 2019, Detroit, Michigan
- Philosophy of The City 2018, Bogota, Columbia
- Philosophy of The City 2017, Porto, Portugal
- Philosophy of The City 2016, San Francisco
- Philosophy of The City 2015, Hong Kong, Portland and Mexico City
- Philosophy of The City 2014, Mexico City
- Philosophy of The City 2013, New York
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

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:

Michael Nagenborg, University of Twente
Sanna Lehtinen, Aalto University
Alexandria K. Poole, University of Twente

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

- Michael Nagenborg, University of Twente
- Sanna Lehtinen, Aalto University
- Alexandria K. Poole, University of Twente
- 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

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