Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship

The University of London is pleased to announce a new round of applications to its Banister Fletcher  Global Fellowship in Urban Studies, established between its two bases in London and Paris. This opportunity reflects the University’s commitment to connecting two of the most economically and ethnically diverse cities in Europe through its research and educational collaborations. It is piloted by the University’s Institute in Paris, drawing on the support of the London Research and Policy Partnership (LRaPP) and the Institute of Historical Research as well as the University’s leading centres of research and learning in urban history, culture, design and theory, including the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and Goldsmiths, University of London.   

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 be mapped from what are often perceived as “only” local dynamics into a transnational frame, and what do we gain in doing so?  

Applications 

Applications are now open! 

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.

Olivier Marboeuf will take up the fourth edition of the Banister Fletcher Fellowship for 2023-24. 'Distant Islands, Spectral Cities' will examine the 'boomerang effect' (Aimé Césaire) of 'the invention of the Caribbean' on Western societies. In particular, it will look at all the human, cultural, economic and epistemological consequences of this 'invention' on the infrastructures and sociabilities of the capitals of the major empires that contributed to it: Paris and London. A series of texts and interviews, published online monthly beginning in January 2024, will announce progressively the contents and problematics of the programme, as well as participants. The main series of events – which will include presentations, workshops, lecture-performances, listening sessions, film screenings and walks – will take place in Paris from 22 to 27 April 2024.

Professor Simone’s Fellowship Programme is entitled Urban Life at the Extensions. It engages in collaborative work with the Beyond Inhabitation Lab and a number of frontline associations and networks in the Paris area to build a series of seminars and joint investigations. It explores the notion of ‘extensions’ in ways that themselves exceed the focus on extension of city form to suggest that going beyond can take place anywhere and is manifested not only in new territorial formations but also in ways of living and inhabiting.

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.