South-to-South Dialogue Webinar

Join our online webinar 'South-to-South Dialogue' 
Hosted by the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning.

Date and Time: 
Wednesday June 12, 2024 at 7-9 pm (Sydney Time)
Friday June 14, 2024 at 6-8 pm (Sydney Time)
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Location: Online

Event Description

‘South-to-South Dialogue’ is part of an unfolding research agenda focused on ‘the right to the ‘smart’ city in the Global South’(Alizadeh & Prasad, 2023). It builds on many strong arguments (Parnell & Oldfield, 2016; Samara et al., 2013; Sheppard et al., 2013) for a distinct field of enquiry – ‘Southern urbanism’ – informed by politics of knowledge production/distribution, and the power relations that have long been used to silence and sideline in post-colonial cities with a ‘hidden’ Southern side (Roy, 2014, 2019; Spivak, 2004).

More specifically, we acknowledge the fast pace of smart city planning and practices across the Global South (Alizadeh, 2021), pushed by a combination of motivated national governments and vested international corporations. The ambitious smart city plans in different corners of the Global South reinforce the need for a provincialised understanding of Southern smart cities (Miller et al., 2021), accounting for the contextual differences across the South.

South-to-South Dialogue Webinar provides a platform in which leading and emerging academics, side by side, share their ongoing research exposing, proposing, and/or politicising (Marcus, 2009, 2012) ‘just (smart) cities of the Global South’. Here, we aspire to articulate the shortcomings of smart cities from a Southern critical perspective to elevate the ongoing empirical studies on the subject, shed light on the gaps in knowledge, and produce a normative alternative vision.

Your presence at this webinar will greatly enrich our dialogue and collective exploration of ‘just smart cities of the Global South’. Please register via this page, noting that the Zoom link for each session will be sent to the participants 48 hours ahead of each session.

Provisional Agenda
Wednesday June 12, 2024 at 7-9 pm (Sydney Time)

AbdouMaliq Simone (University of Sheffield)
The Lining of Surfaces

Lutfun Nahar Lata (University of Melbourne)
Digital Bangladesh, Gig Economy and the Challenges Gig Workers Face in Continuing Their Work in Everyday Life

Tooran Alizadeh (University of Sydney), Deepti Prasad (University of Sydney)
Smart Technologies and the Fundamental Human Rights in India

Diganta Das (Nanyang Technological University), Arunima Ghoshal (De Montfort University), Anwesha Aditi (University College London)
Provincializing Smart Urbanism: Landings, Ruptures, and Reinventions in India

Leela Fernandes (independent scholar, political scientist, and author)
Water and the Smart City: Inequality, Access and Sustainability in Contemporary India

Friday June 14, 2024 at 6-8 pm (Sydney Time)

Persis Taraporevala (Birkbeck, University of London)
Historicising Indian Smart Cities

Tathagata Chatterji (XIM University, Bhubaneswar)
Governing Just Smart Cities for the Global South: Social Inclusion and Local Political Culture

Carol Upadhya (National Institute of Advanced Studies, India)
Agrarian Land, Urban Property, and Uneven Development in India

Yunpeng Zhang (University College Dublin)
Everyday Smart Urbanisation in Liminal Spaces in China

Yiran Yue (University College Dublin)
A Review of Informal Resistance to Smart Mobility Platforms in Urban China

Lorena Melgaço (Lund University), Camila Freitas de Souza (Lund University)
Corporate Smart City Governmentality: A Brazilian Case

Organisers Bio

We, Associate Professor Tooran Alizadeh and Dr. Deepti Prasad, extend this invitation for a South-to-South Dialogue as two non-white women of the Global South, born, raised, educated, and worked in the Southern cities as built environment professionals in various roles. We, however, acknowledge our collective three decades of living, studying, and working on unceded lands of the First Nations people in Australia – one of the few major countries located in the southern hemisphere and yet categorised in the Global North. Academic life in Australia has provided us with ongoing opportunities to conduct empirical urban research in numerous Southern cities and think and write (Alizadeh, 2021; Prasad et al., 2021; Prasad et al., 2022; Prasad et al., 2023) about the implications well beyond to inform contemporary urban studies.