Urban Inhabitation in the Anthropocene
Between the 25th and 27th April 2023, we held the Urban Inhabitation in the Anthropocene conference in Sheffield, UK. The programme of the conference was in line with the Urban Insitute’s signature programme and centered on the LO-ACT themes of everyday climate action and social justice. Each day of the conference presented a step towards a sustainable future, from assessing our current state of crisis, to looking at the other side and challenging the status quo, to finding hope.
We would like to thank again all the brilliant researchers who took part in this conference.
CRISIS
Session 1: Inhabiting a broken world
Introduction
Opening Keynote
Response
Session 2: Confronting capitalist ruins, living with precarity
Session 3: The construction of climate apartheid
Public Lecture
THE OTHER SIDE
Session 4: Living in a more-than-human world
Session 5: Challenging coloniality
Session 6: The plural meanings of climate justice, roundtable
Part I: Energy and carbon
- Julie Sze // Reimaging a Just Urban Transition in an Unjust World
- Valerie Olson // Designing Multidimensional Research for the Urban Anthropocene
Part II: Adaptation
FINDING HOPE
Session 7: Affective homespaces
Session 8: Care, love and social change in the Anthropocene
Session 9: Dreaming up spaces of hope
Closing Keynote
Design Workshop
Exhibition
In parallel to sessions, we hosted the exhibition Everyday Life in Ekangala and Hawassa curated by Paula Meth (University of Sheffield). The exhibition draws us into the lives of young adults living in South Africa (Ekangala) and Ethiopia (Hawassa) in order to better understand their work/ housing nexuses in relation to wider structural realities and infrastructural changes.
Hawassa is the site of Africa’s largest industrial park, but the growing city is experiencing a crisis in housing provision following decades of underinvestment; Ekangala in contrast benefits from decent state housing for the urban poor but its collapsing Ekandustria industrial complex means secure employment is unachievable for most.
The exhibition explores how young people navigate these work/housing nexuses. The exhibition materials are a mix of those crafted by young adults engaged in a British Academy ‘Youth Futures’ research project (2020-2023) and materials produced by ‘professional photographers’ and project researchers. They include a song, ‘selfie portraits’, poetry, stories, and video recordings (produced by the youth), alongside photographs of them and their homes, and brief quotations from life history interviews. Through these, we gain insights into their domestic spaces, their relationships with their urban spaces, and we learn of their dreams and frustrations. Their stories provide insights into urban mobility and stuckness, poverty and the challenges of ‘entrepreneurialism’, how housing is shared and used, and the significance of family in shaping youth’s futures.