Dr Igor Calzada, MBA, presents the paper 'Comparing Smart City-Regional Governance Strategies in Bristol, Glasgow, Bilbao & Barcelona' at the University of Oxford on 18th Feb 2016.

1. URBAN GOVERNANCE AND
ITS DISCONTENTS
18-19 February, 2016
St Anne’s College, Oxford
CONFERENCE
PROGRAMME

2. Welcome
The city provides a particular lens through which we make the social and economic world visible. But how
might we develop scholarship that recognises the differences between cities, acknowledges that they are
characterised by particular histories and unique geographies and, at the same time, understands the potential
to learn from different experiences? Much recent scholarship on the contemporary city has followed this
question in different directions to consider what it might mean to generate understanding of emergent cities
in the near future. Whether pursuing a ‘science of cities’, unpacking a metropolitan historical sensibility, or
developing a notion of a new scholarship of comparative urbanism, such challenges raise particular questions
around the future city that this conference seeks to address. Breaking down empirical and conceptual
boundaries between cities of the global south and the longstanding urban concentrations of the affluent west,
the megacities of the BRICs, and the rapidly growing urban concentrations across the globe, we explore
debates that resonate for them all.
Over two days, we focus on four such clusters of discussion. We look at the tensions between the
extemporised and the rational metropolis in our first dialogue that considers the juxtaposition of the
spontaneous and the planned city. In our second dialogue we follow this juxtaposition with a consideration
of the balance between the power of infrastructure to reshape the city, the normative dimensions of this
restructuring, and the potential for urban democracy to mediate the tensions between the two. In Athens,
Caracas, Dhaka, Istanbul and London the square and the public realm have, in recent years, become the site
of a renewed focus of dissent in the face of such change. Hence, our third discourse examines the ‘right to
the city’: a phrase with deep connections to Paris in 1968 and the writing of the French leftist Henri Lefebvre
that has now been mainstreamed into UN policy discussion. Our fourth and final discourse focuses on the
aesthetics of such change, how the horizon of the metropolitan tomorrow is made visible through a register
that is aesthetic as much as economic, asking how art projects might reshape the way in which we rethink our
urban futures.
In each of these areas of intense debate, the conference brings together scholars who are on the cutting edge
of global urban research face-to-face with established and innovative practitioners—architects, activists, policy
makers, and artists. Through a series of rigorous, yet accessible, public dialogues, practitioners and scholars
will grapple with the intellectual and material implications of their interventions and theories on contemporary
cities. Each debate will be preceded by a small panel of academics and practitioners presenting papers that
speak to the same key issues as the respective debates and which will lay the groundwork for the following
discussion.
The conference forms part of the ongoing work of the network of researchers and research centres that is the
Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities (http://www.futureofcities.ox.ac.uk) and links to the ESRC Urban
Transformations programme (www.urbantransformations.ox.ac.uk). At a time when the world has become
increasingly urban, the challenges of the shaping of cities of the 21st Century have never been more pressing.
The Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities draws together a network of scholars and research that crosses
the humanities, social, and natural sciences to address innovative ways of thinking about the major challenges
facing humanity in the 21st century.
Professor Steve Rayner
Co-Director, Future of Cities
Programme
Professor Michael Keith
Co-Director, Future of Cities
Programme
Professor Steve Rayner
Co-Director
Future of Cities Programme
Professor Michael Keith
Co-Director
Future of Cities Programme

3. 8:30 - 9:00 Registration
Welcome and Introductory Remarks
Professor Michael Keith, Co-Director, Future of Cities programme
Professor Steve Rayner, Co-Director, Future of Cities programme
From Dogma to Style in Urban Planning
Thomas Duschlbauer, Professor, University of Applied Sciences, St. Pölten
On the Relationship Between Self-Organised Spatial Practices and Institutional Urban Planning
Lígia Milagres, PhD Candidate, Mina Gerais Federal University
Singapore as Model, Varanasi as Muse: The Evolution of India’s Smart Cities Mission
Shahana Chattaraj, Postdoctoral Fellow, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Small Property Rights Housing as Spontaneous Urbanization in China
Li Sun, Postdoctoral Researcher, Delft University of Technology
Zhi Liu, Director of the Peking University, Lincoln Institute Centre for Urban Development
Bodies, Space and Atmospheres: Reinterpreting In/Formality Through the Lawscape
Francesca Ansaloni and Miriam Tedeschi, Regional Planning and Public Policy, Università IUAV di Venezia
Reinier de Graaf
Head of Urban Design, OMA
Bruno Moser
Head of Urban Design, Foster + Partners
AbdouMaliq Simone
Professor of Sociology and Urbanism, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
The Social Construction of Space in a Splintered Southern City
Sérgio Carvalho Benício de Mello, PhD, City University London
Cédrick Cunha Gomes da Silva, PhD Candidate, Federal University of Pernambuco
Jouberte Maria Leandro Santos, PhD Candidate, Federal University of Pernambuco
Building “Homes with Value”: Mortgage Finance and the Remaking of the Mexican City
Georgia Hartman, PhD Candidate, University of California
Medellin in Motion: Governmental Technologies of City-model Making
Catalina Ortiz, Lecturer, University College London
Comparing Smart City-Regional Governance Strategies in Bristol, Glasgow, Bilbao and Barcelona
Igor Calzada, Future of Cities, University of Oxford
The Future on/of Margins: Infrastructure Development as Social Justice in Casablanca, Morocco
Cristiana Strava, PhD Candidate, University of Oxford
Susan Parnell
Professor of Geography, University of Cape Town
Antanas Mockus
Former Mayor of Bogota, Columbia, 1995-1998; 2001-2003
9:15 - 11:00
11:30 - 12:45
14:15 - 16:00
16:30 - 17:45
Day 1 - Thursday 18th February 2016
9:00 - 9:15
Panel 1: Making the City - Spontaneous VS Planned?
Debate 1: Making the City - Spontaneous VS Planned?
11:00 - 11:30 Coffee Break
12:45 - 14:15 Lunch
Panel 2: Governing the City - Where Do Infrastructure, Democracy, and Social Justice Meet?
16:00 - 16:30 Coffee Break
Debate 2: Governing the City - Where Do Infrastructure, Democracy, and Social Justice Meet?
17:45 Day 1 Close
18:00 - 19:00 Conference Drinks and Networking Session
Sponsored by the Urban Transformations Network

4. 9:30 - 10:00 Registration
An Informational Right to the City? Code, Content and Control of Urbanized Information
Joe Shaw, PhD Candidate, Oxford Internet Institute
Mark Graham, Associate Professor, Oxford Internet Institute
The Right to the City Beyond Centrality: Foundational Urban Systems in a Post-Labour World
Stephen Hall, Research Fellow, University of Leeds
Alex Schafran, Lecturer, University of Leeds
Participation and Its Discontents: Notes from Post-Revolutionary Cairo
Safa Ashoub, Advisor, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit
WJ Dorman, Honorary Fellow, University of Edinburgh
10:00 - 11:00
11:30 - 12:45
Sheela Patel
Founding Director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers
Mark Purcell
Professor of Urban Planning, University of Washington
A Republic of Players: Imagining Urban Change in the “New” Ruhr Metropole
Cynthia Browne, PhD Candidate, Harvard University
The City as Immersive Exhibition of Past and Future: Using Time Layers for Participatory Inscription
of Urban Memory
Dr Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe, PhD Candidate, Harvard University
Alberto Barradas Chacón
De-muzzling the Muzzled Ones: Parisian Performance Poetry and Territories of Exception
Cicilie Fagerlid, Associate Professor, University of Oslo
Understanding Community Participation in Planning Through Theater
Dr Paul Cowie, Research Associate, Newcastle University
Katy Vanden, Cap-a-Pie, Newcastle
Brad McCormick, Cap-a-Pie, Newcastle
Gwilym Lawrence, Cap-a-Pie, Newcastle
16:15 - 17:30
Marcus Banks
Professor and Head of School, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Oxford University
Mary Mattingly
Artist
14:15 - 15:45
Day 2 - Friday 19th February 2016
Panel 3: Mobilizing in the City - Amidst Global Urban Protest, the ‘Right to the City’ is the Right to What?
11:00 - 11:30 Coffee Break
Debate 3: Mobilizing in the City - Amidst Global Urban Protest, the ‘Right to the City’ is the Right to What?
12:45 - 14:15 Lunch
Panel 4: Representing the City - Can Art Projects Re-figure and Challenge Urban Futures?
15:45 - 16:15 Coffee Break
Debate 4: Representing the City - Can Art Projects Re-figure and Challenge Urban Futures?
17:30 - 17:45 Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Professor Michael Keith, Co-Director, Future of Cities programme
Professor Steve Rayner, Co-Director, Future of Cities programme
17:45 Day 2 Close