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. 

The Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship invites scholars to place alternative forms and spaces of knowledge production at the heart of proposals that may build on research and creative practice developed in relation to cultures and histories of the built environment across the world, but also more directly within the perimeter of the Paris-London framework. It encourages candidates to consider how their work will both benefit from sustained consideration of this Paris-London framework, while also contributing to the elucidation of it. It also anticipates the importance of historical perspectives and welcomes proposals anchored in the city as archive.  

For the second iteration of the Banister Fletcher Fellowship, the University of London Institute in Paris in partnership with the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), is delighted to welcome Dr John Bingham-Hall to lead a programme of research that will explore some of the implications of the new focus on ‘green infrastructures’ as they are playing out in the cities of Paris and London. You can check the programme by clicking on the image below.

During her Banister Fletcher Fellowship, Dr Min Kyung Lee curated a series of events that aimed to understand the social, cultural and epistemological consequences of the comprehensive quantification project on the urban forms and inhabitants of metropoles such as London, Paris and beyond. Her lectures focused on the Second Empire Paris and Interwar France, while the two panel conversations she convened brought together perspectives from around the world and a range of disciplines from law to data science to art and architectural history.