The Banister Fletcher Fellowship 2021-22

In recent years the significance of green ‘spaces’ – parks, private gardens, but also allotments and more or less formalized community gardens – within our cities has taken on an importance that is both personal and political. Not only have our individual practices and awareness of non-human life around us shifted radically through the recent pandemic and in the face of accelerating climate change. The questions posed by inter-species dependencies for health, climate adaptation and food security have entered mainstream planning thinking. 

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. Entitled ‘Commons, Wilds, Infrastructures’, the work will take an experimental approach to developing new understandings of urban natures and their capacities to produce (counter)publics by using sonic and choreographic walking methods to produce a critical cartography of connections between human and non-human cultures. These participative walks will be supported and developed by a series of seminars and a public lecture, programmed through Spring 2022.

Biography

After a PhD in Architectural Space and Computation at the Bartlett School of Architecture, John Bingham-Hall has pursued his interests in the ‘staging’ of public life and how such processes can contribute to understanding the socio-political challenges cities face today to be made more dynamic, open, and just. Spanning scholarship, creative practice and cultural programming, his work has stretched across multiple scenes and forms. Since 2017 he has been Director of Theatrum Mundi created initially under the auspices of the London School of Economics Cities centre, led by Professor Richard Sennett and more recently established as an international research organisation focused on transdisciplinary practice and cultural infrastructures. John’s work has also found expression recently in the forthcoming volume Sonic Urbanism: Listening to Non-Human Life (Theatrum Mundi, 2021), which will be launched at Iklectik Art Lab in London on 19th November.

The Banister Fletcher Fellowship: A Paris/London Fellowship in Urban Studies

As the significance of shared culture and robust exchange between the cities of London and Paris came increasingly to the fore in the wake of Brexit, the University of London decided the endowment of a global fellowship opportunity piloted by the University of London Institute in Paris in partnership with the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), the University’s leading centres of research and learning in urban history, culture, design and theory.

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.

More information here.