Pues ahí va el anuncio para la charla que daré este jueves en el GSD, como actividad paralela al seminario de Neil Brenner sobre ‘territorios extremos’ en el que estoy participando desde que aterricé en Cambridge.

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Territory, planning, enclosure: Towards a genealogy of planetary urbanization

This lecture will discuss the connection between Urban Theory Lab’s current analysis of the ‘extreme territories’ of planetary urbanization and the historical reterritorializations deployed by English enclosure in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Following a general overview of his research project on the social history of planning, Prof. Sevilla will explore how English parliamentary enclosure opened a new spatial rationality incorporating both the city and the countryside into a single territorial logic linked to wider social and political economic strategies, a move that both addresses and problematizes Henri Lefebvre’s hypothesis of a generalized urbanization. From this point of view historical enclosure can be understood not only as a precedent in the logic of dispossession that would later pervade planning’s spatial rationality, but also as a case of original extended urbanization that allows for a broader and better comprehension of the genealogy of the urban society.

Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago is Associate Professor at the Town and Regional Planning Department, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. His current research focuses on blending social, urban and planning histories to develop a social history of planning, i.e. an operative, effective historiographical account from below that works both as a history of our urban present and as a critique of contemporary planning techniques. This research project is developed through an analysis of the spatialities of social reproduction in periods of major social change and in the context of the broader economic and political dynamics of capitalism, a perspective that provides a global sense of the production of local social space. In this framework, planning appears at the intersection of bipolitics and geopolitics — a governmental device that regulates the spatial dimension of social reproduction of working and subaltern classes to the benefit of particular hegemonic blocs and according to wider regional, national or international strategies.