This Global Fellowship aims to build experientially embedded research that reflects and informs the ways Paris and London are both distinct and connected. In the current context of pandemic crisis, which is heightening still more the rising nationalism, deepening inequalities, and environmental crisis of the contemporary era, the fellowship invites interdisciplinary work to help shape new understandings of how public works, private investment, and civil-society action interact and impinge upon one another. As patterns of labour and mobility change, as the imperatives of climate action and disease control increasingly shape urban policy and infrastructure, how are cities adapting, transforming, failing, and thriving?
The fellowship seeks in particular to foster new attention to urban dynamics of welfare and solidarity. Much scholarship focuses on macro-factors in global city analysis, stressing the intensification of global competition between urban centres. This emphasis tends to occlude significant transformation of the welfare state and related municipal and/or civil-society consultation and action. Yet community-led innovation and knowledge are increasingly shaping urban and design cultures of access to public and private spaces. They are generating new vernaculars and alternative forms of circular economies and structures of solidarity. Can these processes by mapped from what are often perceived as ‘only’ local dynamics into a transnational frame?
The Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship intends to foster understanding of the potential of these forms of capillary action and to establish a series of published short texts which will constitute a reference in urban studies.