Meet the editors
About this issue
Summary
The aim of this issue is to contribute to a better understanding of conflict and contradiction as potential forces for urban transformation and to explore how citizens negotiate with institutions and vice versa. Case studies from the United States, Columbia, Belgium and France each reveal a form of urban change that occurred through conflict but at different scales and in contrasting circumstances. In their conclusion, the editors propose a new methodology for learning from conflict which they call ‘a phenomenology of change’ approach.
Nanke Verloo is Assistant Professor in Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam. Connecting Anthropology, Public Administration and Planning, her research takes an ethnographic approach to urban conflict. She recently edited the volume Seeing the City. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Study of the Urban (2020). In her current project, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research Talent Grant (VENI), she studies conflicts that emerge from participatory planning and other efforts to democratize cities in the Global North and South.
Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Development and Urbanism and former Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). Trained as a sociologist, Davis is author of numerous books, edited volumes, and monographs, including most recently Transforming Urban Transport (2018) and Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Politics in Urban Spaces (2011). Her various chapters and articles explore urban governance, the relations between urbanization and national development, and the role of politics and planning in the socio-spatial formation of cities. Current research focuses on conflict cities and the role of spatial strategies and tactics in reducing violence and advancing reconciliation.
