@affectinthecity
Affect In the City (AFFINITY): The Emotional Dimensions of Urban Justice. Posting updates and resources on philosophy, cities & affect. MSCA/YUFE4Postdocs EU-funded project (25-28) 📍Antwerp Views my own: @lopezcantero.bsky.social #philsky
A couple of questions:
1) Can anyone recommend any (critical, early) reviews of Pride in Place that I might not have found?
2) Is anyone familiar with examples of Pride in Place boards talking about or engaging with space for play? I have found a few but guess there are more.
Thank you!
'In Defence of Walkability as a Crime Prevention Strategy'.
New preprint with @ianloader.bsky.social
We challenge the consensus that walkable neighbourhoods are more criminogenic.
We highlight two flaws in the literature: i) overreliance on police statistics; and ii) neglect of motoring offences.
Place is not passive—Memory is not settled
We work across cognitive science, social science & the arts to examine how people find their way. In contested pasts & rapidly changing environments, understanding place and memory underpins how we locate ourselves—intellectually, socially and historically
Fantastic news! It is also really good that this will be for pedestrians exclusively, with separate plans for new bike lanes. These do need to be protected and safe, but (although not all urbanists agree) it is super important to have pedestrian only zones, particularly for children and the elderly
Read here for a summary of the project published in the EPIC project blog ⬇️
So much potential influence of int. law on the affective lives of urban dwellers. Some of them are related to human rights (which is Prof Schmid’s focus) but others can be more narrow moral rights, or special obligations of urban authorities, like fostering caring relations. New lit to explore!/2
Just attended Prof Evelyne Schmid’s talk, hosted by Antwerp’s Urban Studies Institute. Very interesting talk on how local actors engage with international law, the mismatches between urban life and treatises conceived to improve it, and the role of “legal intermediarians”/1
Great workshop today at Antwerp on Moral Psychology & The City! Elisabetta Gobbo talked about affect & gentrification; Jamie Draper presented his expressive theory of spatial inequality; Marian Counihan gave a super useful taxonomy of urban diversity & I shared my wip on affective rights to the city
This is probably already obvious to all the urban planning nerds, but I don't feel like it has broken through to normies like myself. Among many reasons why street parking is bad is that—especially with giant cars nowadays—it's bad for pedestrian visibility at intersections!
Very happy about this— I’ve learned a lot from Bennett School’s (and its predecessor institute’s) research on place and identity over the years, and it’s directly influenced how I conceived my project on emotion and urban justice. Excited to be part of it and to expand the phil of urban policy!
Back to reading about litter and waste in anticipation for this talk:
Photo by Kaique Rocha for Pexels.
Does living near a #park reduce your risk of chronic disease?
Join Georgia Tech's School of #Architecture for Episode 50 of Redesigning #Cities hosted by Ellen Dunham-Jones & feat. Dr. Larry Frank — renowned #urban scholar behind the term #walkability
Feb 13 | 3:30 PM ET
Register: bit.ly/4kvs6ko
The NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program is thrilled to be hosting an event on how cities can manage human-wildlife conflict! Join us for a preview of our upcoming report and discussion with Colin Jerolmack and Adalene Minelli.
Feb 23, 4pm ET, followed by a reception.
sites.google.com/nyu.edu/wild...
Brilliant and exhaustive thread on the 15-minute city and the latest astonishing disinformation about the concept, this time applied to a proposed restriction of road use *to cars* in Oxford.
An “overhaul of England’s planning policy” that does not tackle simply what people can *do* in the built environment, but also how people *feel*, is doomed and dead on arrival—particularly if those who are the most affectively powerless, like women, are ignored/& 4
In turn, policy makers can be traced as the main responsible party for what philosophers like David Spurrett and others call “hostile scaffolding”, in this case the design of spaces that are directly and clearly damaging for women cognitive and affective processing/3
Women and girls cannot shaped and be shaped by life in cities if they do not feel safe, and they cannot feel safe if policy makers don’t remedy the increase danger women face in cities in virtue of being women. Krueger calls this “affective powerlessness”/2
This is a depressing but very accurate example of what philosopher Joel Krueger calls “ecological affective injustice”—ways in which the environment can disrupt emotional well-being and spatial agency, built on & building upon oppressive and unequal social relationships/1
⚠️Registrations of the most commonly-sold pick-up trucks have nearly doubled in just over a decade!
📈Our new analysis has found a major increase in the number of large, US-style pick-up trucks on UK roads over the past decade - with serious implications for pedestrian safety, particularly children.
Flyer with USF logo for the seminar "Urbicide in Palestine. – A Sociological, Historical and Architectural Approach" on a Photo by Yousef Zaanoun/Activestills. And the text "The seminar will focus on the concept of urbicide in the Palestinian context, combining approaches from sociology, history, and architecture that put colonial planning at the centre of the analysis. Presentations: Urban and Architectural Genocide in Gaza: A Socio-Historical Reading Abaher El-Sakka, Birzeit University Disrupted Urbanity in Colonial Settlement: Planning as Urbicide Abdullah Al Bayyari, Institute for Palestine Studies, and the American University in Cairo. Systematic Dispossession: Towards Urbicide in Jerusalem Maha Samman, Al-Quds University Moderated by Himmat Zoubi, Mada al-Carmel 29th Jan 2026 17:00 - 19:00 (GMT+2) Online"
Flyer with USF logo for the seminar "Urbicide in Palestine. – A Sociological, Historical and Architectural Approach" on a Photo by Yousef Zaanoun/Activestills. And the text "The seminar will focus on the concept of urbicide in the Palestinian context, combining approaches from sociology, history, and architecture that put colonial planning at the centre of the analysis. Presentations: Urban and Architectural Genocide in Gaza: A Socio-Historical Reading Abaher El-Sakka, Birzeit University Disrupted Urbanity in Colonial Settlement: Planning as Urbicide Abdullah Al Bayyari, Institute for Palestine Studies, and the American University in Cairo. Systematic Dispossession: Towards Urbicide in Jerusalem Maha Samman, Al-Quds University Moderated by Himmat Zoubi, Mada al-Carmel 29th Jan 2026 17:00 - 19:00 (GMT+2) Online"
📢 Upcoming Seminar: Urbicide in Palestine
Join the #USFSeminarSeries event on Jan 29, 17:00 (GMT+2)! 📢
It explores colonial planning and spatial violence with Abaher El-Sakka, Abdullah Al Bayyari & Maha Samman. Co-organised with Mada al-Carmel.
📍 Online 🌐 Arabic/English 🔗 ow.ly/Wpm450Y44vb
Just came accross the concept of ‘motonormativity’, which will be the subject of this very interesting workshop at #OUVEMA. I will sadly miss the event, but these reseaechers rise several philosophically interesting questions to think about in the future
‼️El Ayuntamiento de Madrid suspende el derribo del edificio del antiguo Baobab en Lavapiés después de la denuncia del PSOE
Today's reading: Nathan Whelan-Jackson on disability and urban maps. V interesting claim that cities involve different 'stances' or ways to engage w the environment, & that disabled people often have to justify their presence--a threat to agency that is partially addressed through mapping technology
An easy to follow and accessible explanation of some of the main arguments for and against preservation of urban heritage (this is published in Think, a philosophy journal aimed at the wider public managed by @triphilosophy.bsky.social; highly recommend it to the non-philosophers in here)
Sunday read: "Livability"
Simona Capisani argues for a justice-based framework of climate mobilities grounded in a right to livable locality, centering embodied human relationships to place with a capability approach.
#Philosophy #ClimateChange #housing
www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/the-new...
“From the perspective of young people …the cage is a piece of the city that is theirs: a space in which they can have greater autonomy and agency than perhaps anywhere else”.
This week the EU announced plans to regulate housing: more availability, less short-term rentals. @eurocities.eu summarizes the news with reactions from city officials, and warns about the conditions that are needed to make the plans work: sufficient funding, practical tools, and city involvement
“Marginalization in road regulation is an injustice, then—not just an inefficiency or poor design—because enclosure makes us dependent on roads, and that puts us in troublingly unequal and hierarchical relationships with each other”.
Cities aren’t built for older people – our study shows many can’t walk fast enough to beat a pedestrian crossing. Many older people with reduced mobility say they feel ‘hurried’, ‘rushed’ and ‘unsafe" when walking around their city. theconversation.com/cities-arent...
🚦 Road transport remains the only major mode in Europe without a dedicated EU safety authority.
Establishing an EU Road Safety Agency would help move the EU closer to zero deaths on our roads, particularly as automated vehicles become more widespread.
etsc.eu/etsc-and-par... @etsc.eu