Mark Blacksell Lecture 2026 - Imperial urban geopolitics

Imperial urban geopolitics

The lecture begins by considering Plymouth’s worldly entanglements and wartime destruction to reflect on how empires, death and war are folded into the textures of an everyday urban fabric. Such reflections follow the tracks of Mark Blacksell's (1968) pioneering doctoral thesis about the effects of bombing on the urban geography of the Ruhr.

It then moves on to reflect on cities as centres of economic, political and symbolic power, drawing on scholarly debates about imperial cities, geopolitics and planetary urbanization. It interrogates how and when urbanization becomes entangled with imperialism. It moves beyond the typology of the ‘imperial city’ and, instead, considers how the idea of the imperial urban can be used to understand geopolitics. The lecture explores these ideas across a diverse range of places, notably Makkah (Mecca), the Pearl River Delta, Silicon Valley, Yangon (Rangoon) and Singapore’s cross-border hinterlands in Johor and Riau.

Speaker Information

Professor James Sidaway is a distinguished human geographer with a truly international reputation. He has published over 350 articles on topics that include, but are not limited to, political geography, geopolitics, cities, states and conflicts. In 2022 James was presented with the Busk Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, who called him “an exceptional geographer whose research over several decades has broken new ground in political geography, geopolitics and critical area studies”. He also enthuses about the history and philosophy of geography, being the co-author of ‘Geography and Geographers’ (with the late Ron Johnston) and co-editor of ‘Introducing Human Geography’ – both of which are landmark undergraduate texts. Currently based at the National University of Singapore, James also served as Professor of Human Geography at the University of Plymouth between 2006-2009. The lecture is an opportunity to listen to a truly international scholar with a global reputation.

The Mark Blacksell Lecture

The purpose of the Mark Blacksell lecture series is to bring scholars working at the forefront of geography to University of Plymouth to present their research to a public audience. The lecture series is named after Professor Mark Blacksell, a human geographer with unusually widespread interests and expertise. He was appointed Professor of Geography at University of Plymouth in 1994, and served as both Head of the Geography Department and Dean of the Faculty of Science before he retired in 2003.

Following the lecture, light refreshments will be provided.

For any queries about the event, please contact [email protected]

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