This panel conversation will gather a vibrant group of speakers from the fields of architecture and art history, urbanism, sociology and law to discuss questions of speculative practices that operate often elusively at the heart of contemporary experience. 

The quantification of space conditioned the rise of a specific kind of financial speculation as the idea of property itself became linked to quantitative values. The speculative practices around real estate, however, are just one consequence of the fusion of space and numbers. Others include the vast social and economic disparities found on multiples scales from the most intimate to the global, as well as new forms of agency and subjects that have been negotiated through speculative practices.  

This theme’s conversation and workshop seek to consider the ways in which quantitative models of urban growth have been used to develop urban spaces and practices. On the one hand, how have practices of quantification created speculative practices in economic and political terms? On the other, how have these same practices mismeasured the world, our lives, and our relationships? How have they brought confusion and opacity while claiming clarity and transparency? What opportunities are there to consider different critical methods of speculation, precisely through the mistakes and lacunae of our measurement systems?

Confirmed participants 

• Sony Devabhaktuni (Architecture, University of Hong Kong) 
• Wendy Espeland (Sociology, Northwestern University) 
• Paul Jaskot (Art History, Duke University) 
• Ayala Levin (Architectural History, UCLA) 
• Christopher Marcinkoski (Landscape Architecture, UPenn) 
• Evelyn Patterson (Demography and Law, Vanderbilt University) 
• AbdouMaliq Simone (Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, University of Cape Town, Max Planck Institute)  
• Olga Touloumi (Architectural History, Bard College) 

This panel conversation will be followed by a workshop on 26 May at 6:30pm (Paris) aimed at graduate students and junior faculty drawn from the partner institutions of ULIP, UCL and QMUL, but participation is welcome from interested parties coming from other places, and if you are interested in participating, you are warmly invited to get in touch with Anna-Louise Milne at anna-louise.milne@ulip.lon.ac.uk.  

Find out more about Dr Min Kyung Lee’s Banister Fletcher programme and the fellowship here.