This Global Fellowship aims to build experientially embedded research that reflects and informs the ways urban environments are responding to deepening inequalities and environmental crisis, as well as the effects of rising nationalism. It invites interdisciplinary work to help shape new understandings of the variable triangulations of public works, private investment, and civil-society action. 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, well-being, and solidarity. Much scholarship focuses on macro-factors in global city analysis, stressing the intensification of competition between urban centres and particular configurations of rivalry and/or emulation, all patterns that tend to dominate the structure of work between Paris and London. Yet community-led innovation and knowledge are increasingly shaping urban and design cultures, generating new vernaculars and alternative forms of circular economies or more or less autonomous structures of solidarity. Can these processes by mapped from what are often perceived as ‘only’ local dynamics into a transnational frame, and what do we gain in doing so?
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.