Urbanisms of Displacement

This talk explores the ongoing displacement of Afro-descendant populations in Cartagena and the urbanisms that emerge from it. It examines three interconnected dynamics: the historical racial conflict that pushed Afro-descendant communities to the city’s periphery, the arrival of internally displaced populations since the 1990s, and the strategic use of environmental discourse by investment groups seeking to capture occupied land. The talk frames Cartagena’s urbanisms as products of socio-political processes that reproduce racial exclusion.

The event will feature the launch of the book 'Displaced Urbanism' (Routledge, 2025) in London. This book critically interrogates dominant narratives surrounding displacement by examining how it unfolds across diverse urban and rural settings worldwide. It addresses the intricate realities of displacement and its impact on the built environment. The event will be followed by drinks and nibbles.

Image Credits: Calais, France, 25th February 2015. Image by Henk Wildschut

Felipe Hernández (University of Cambridge)
Urbanisms of Displacement and Racial (Bio)Politics in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia

This talk explores the ongoing displacement of Afro-descendant populations in Cartagena and the urbanisms that emerge from it. It examines three interconnected dynamics: the historical racial conflict that pushed Afro-descendant communities to the city’s periphery, the arrival of internally displaced populations since the 1990s, and the strategic use of environmental discourse by investment groups seeking to capture occupied land. The talk frames Cartagena’s urbanisms as products of socio-political processes that reproduce racial exclusion.
Giovanna Astolfo (DPU UCL)
Evictability between extinction and emergence. Toward a collectivity otherwise

The talk examines the relation of urban+displacement, its construction and deconstruction, using alternatively an urban lens to understand displacement and a displacement lens to understand the urban. In particular, it explores the third trajectory of life/displacement - the one that makes lives rather than the one that takes lives. It does so through the idea of ‘emergence’ and through juxtaposing three territories where the urban+displacement materializes in different ways, but also where the life/displacement emerges differently, and especially in its relation with the subject – whether collective or individual.
Gihan Karunaratne
Displaced in situ: The Communities Left Behind in Colombo’s Urban Transformation

This talk examines a form of social gentrification accompanying Colombo’s urban transformation, described as the “codification” of the city. It explores how communities remain physically present yet become socially and politically displaced through redevelopment processes. The discussion reflects on the socio-political challenges faced by these communities and on how urban transformation reshapes relationships between neighbouring groups and the sustainability of everyday urban life.
Angeliki Sakellariou (University of Reading)
Occupations of Public Space and the Architecture of Distributed Social Care in Athens

This talk examines how temporary occupations of public space during periods of crisis give rise to distributed infrastructures of social care. It explores the performative and spatial characteristics of these practices and reflects on how they challenge conventional understandings of public space. The discussion considers how ephemeral acts of collective care reshape urban environments and how design might support these emerging forms of social infrastructure.
Camillo Boano (DIST, Politecnico di Torino, Italy)
Displacement and the Opaque Infrastructures of Inhabiting: A Fugitive Urbanism?

This talk offers a closer look at different genealogies of displacement, social fabrics, and spatial forms that forcibly coexist, contributing both to the dematerialisation of borders and the over-materialisation of migrants' support infrastructures and lifeworlds. Offering some diffractions across these different spatial narratives, the chapter puts forward several propositions to engage with the ambivalent proximity that permeates such geographies, allowing the ambiguous management of bodies and spaces while simultaneously distancing itself from techno-salvific and humanitarian-romantic discursive regimes. The suggestion is to indulge in an exercise in fabulation. Borrowing from different authors such as Roane, Nichols and Kopytoff, the idea is to elaborate on the notion of a fugitive frontier, a space that improvises poetics of staying that disobey the carceral and settler logic of territorial composition, imagining and practising different, albeit incomplete, possibilities of living together, while making visible patterns of urban space production and forms of inhabitation.

Giovanna Astolfo (DPU-UCL)

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