Dr Ayona Datta is Lecturer in the Cities Programme in London School of Economics. She has an interdisciplinary background in architecture, environmental design and gender studies. She has practised as an architect in London, and taught architecture in Queen’s University Belfast, before joining the Cities Programme in London School of Economics (LSE) in 2005. In LSE, she teaches courses in city design and social sciences, culture and society, politics of urban sustainability, qualitative research methodologies, and supervises various PhD topics.
Dr Datta’s research interests include gender and space, politics of urban sustainability, and home in the context of mobility and globalisation. She recently completed a British Academy Research Grant on the gendered politics of space and place among squatters in New Delhi. Her most recent work funded by STICERD, is an investigation of the relationships between home, migration and the city through the experiences of East European construction workers in London. She has published in interdisciplinary journals such as Gender Place and Culture, Urban Geography, and Environment and Planning A, and is currently working on a book project titled ‘Illegal Geographies of the City: Gender, Place, and Social agency in a New Delhi Squatter Settlement’.
Abstract:
This talk will focus on the ideas of global and the local in thinking through the varieties of ways that cities are shaped by people and places, and what this means for the futures of cities and built environments in an interconnected world. It premises these discussions on recent calls to think about all cities as ‘ordinary’, which removes the hierarchies and hegemonies of conceptualising ‘global cities/world cities’. It suggests that all cities are globalising, where elements of local and global persist simultaneously. The future of cities therefore, depends not just on ways they are ‘designed’, but also in the ways that people negotiate their access to power within the local and global. This will be illustrated through case studies of different places and social groups across the world – East European construction workers in London arriving in the aftermath of EU expansion who are building the city of the future and living in shared and rented accommodation in London’s East end; Izmir’s elites whose global mobilities produce desires for particular kinds of ‘western’ lifestyles that manifest in luxury gated housing in Turkey; and Delhi’s squatters, whose everyday lives and spaces are marginalised as ‘illegal geographies’, as Delhi gears up to present itself as a ‘world city’ during the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
The case studies illustrate how it is impossible to think of the future of cities without paying attention to both the local and global specificities that produce particular experiences of places and negotiations of power among particular social groups. It suggests how wider structural changes in the EU and UK migration policies transform the future of London’s built environments; it suggests how particular forms of social capital vested within elite groups across the world produce the mobility of built forms across the world, and it illustrates how forms of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ and the race for world city status can exclude rights to the city of certain social groups. The discussion will end with a speculation on how the future of cities should be understood through these complexities of relationships between people, places, and built environments.
