Dr Paroj Banerjee, Dr Ishita Chatterjee, and Dr Raffael Beier
Funding period: 1 September 2025 – 16 October 2026
Type of funding:
Seminar Series
Partner organisations: University College London (Bartlett Development Planning Unit) (United Kingdom), TU Dortmund University (Department of Spatial Planning – International Planning Studies) (Germany), and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali (India)
Events: January 2026 (London, United Kingdom), April 2026 (Mohali, India), and October 2026 (Dortmund, Germany)
Organisers: Dr Paroj Banerjee (Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London, United Kingdom), Dr Ishita Chatterjee (O. P. Jindal Global University, India), and Dr Raffael Beier (TU Dortmund University, Germany)
Team members: Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Aqil Cheddadi, Abdellatif Qamhaieh, Neelesh Kumar, Ratoola Kundu, and Giovanna Astolfo
Contact: Dr Paroj Banerjee
Abstract:
Urban transformation in relation to housing and inhabitation tend to be discussed in two distinct ways: one emphasising the revanchist aftermaths of neoliberal transformation (e.g., Watson 2014; Lees et al. 2016), and the other rebranding responses to urban marginality and dispossession as politics of the informal, entrepreneurial, resistant, navigational and radical (e.g., Bayat 2012; Lancione 2020). In both these epistemologies, marginalised living in the city have been presented as ‘exceptional’, thereby obscuring the more ordinary experiences of inhabitation, subversions to systemic dispossession, and expressions of aspirations of urban dwellers who imagine and inhabit the city in ways that do not align with the dominant understandings of urban inhabitation (Banerjee 2023).
Choosing ‘ordinariness’ and its entanglement with ‘power’ as an analytical frame, this seminar series will decentre academic knowledge production by interrogating dominant framings of marginalised urban living as ‘exceptional’ or ‘deviant’ across disciplines such as urban studies, geography, development studies, anthropology and planning. By foregrounding research and perspectives from scholars as well as activists whose work remains under-represented in urban studies, it aims to significantly advance theorisation and mainstream understanding of urban inhabitation by critically examining “non-dominance” as a conceptual and empirical entry point.
The project seeks to define ‘non-dominance’ as spatio-temporal ontologies located at peripheries of power, which can be read through the deviations from normative expectations of habitability. Cognisant of existing scholarship on inhabitation (Boano and Astolfo, 2020; Lancione, 2021; Simone, 2016), this series will serve as a critical reference point for opening up important conversations on hegemonic normativity and the governmentalities that prescribe how people should inhabit the city, and the various ways people (seek to) deviate from these inherent expectations of habitability.
Through writing workshops, keynote lectures, and practical sessions on academic publishing, early-career and under-represented researchers will gain insights into navigating the academic landscape and countering linguistic and epistemological privilege. Furthermore, we will engage with members of ongoing housing struggles in order to centre their voices and experiences from outside the academy.