Department of Philosophy
POTC

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

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 

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