Cities Across the Globe: People and Places Across Borders

Moises Gonzales’s session, “Myth to Megacity, the Urban Landscape Evolution of Mexico City,” examines how Mexico City’s urban form emerged through layered ecological, colonial, and modern transformations. Framed through ecological urbanism, the talk traces the city from its origins in Lake Texcoco and the Aztec chinampa system to Spanish colonial restructuring, lake drainage, industrial centralization, migration, and informal settlement growth. Gonzales highlights how efforts to restore natural systems must confront the erasure of built environments, neighborhoods, and social fabrics, showing Mexico City as a megacity shaped by constant negotiation between urban development and ecological repair.

Hana Cervinkova’s session, “City and the Symbolic Politics of Neoliberalism in Central Europe,” examines Wrocław, Poland as a case of neoliberal urban branding and memory politics. She argues that the city markets itself as multicultural, open, and historically diverse while simultaneously containing difficult public memories of its German, Jewish, and socialist pasts. Through examples such as the old Jewish cemetery, the Monument of Shared Memory, and Wrocław’s commodified dwarf symbols, Cervinkova shows how heritage is selectively used for place marketing, tourism, and investment while suppressing deeper democratic engagement with memory, identity, and historical responsibility.

Ivan Arenas’s session, “Resisting the Privatization of Public Space: Oaxaca, Mexico,” examines how public spaces become sites of democratic struggle, surveillance, commercialization, and exclusion. Arenas contrasts ideals of the city as a space of public encounter with realities of privatized plazas, regulated protest, tourism-driven development, and consumer-oriented urban space. Focusing on Oaxaca, he shows how the relocation of government offices and commercialization of the historic center weakened traditional protest spaces. The 2006 social movement, however, reclaimed streets through encampments, marches, barricades, assemblies, and protest art, transforming walls into collective sites of political expression and resistance.

Elizabeth L. Sweet’s session examines how internally displaced women in Medellín experience food insecurity as inseparable from violence, health, mobility, and bodily trauma. Drawing on visceral geography, shared cooking events, body-map storytelling, and interviews, Sweet shows how displacement is felt through bodies: broken hearts, empty stomachs, respiratory illness, exhaustion from walking, and memories of violence. Food becomes both a daily struggle and a medium for connection, care, storytelling, and survival. The session argues that urban planning must better account for embodied experiences and move beyond public/private divides to address intimate, structural realities shaping displaced women’s lives in cities today globally.

Tarini Bedi’s session examines women political brokers in peri-urban Mumbai and their role in shaping slum redevelopment, public housing, and everyday urban politics. Drawing on ethnographic research with working-class women affiliated with the Shiv Sena, Bedi explores how figures such as Shanta and Kanta operate as “matrons,” mediating between residents, political parties, builders, and state agencies. Rather than framing their actions simply as resistance, she describes them as producers of friction, disorder, and negotiation. The session highlights how violence, patronage, gendered authority, material needs, and political presence shape urban development and democratic practice in Mumbai.

Maria de los Angeles Torres’s session, “Citizens in the Present: Youth Engagement in the Americas,” examines how engaged young people in Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Chicago understand activism, citizenship, rights, and public voice. Drawing on interviews and personal narratives with youth leaders, Torres highlights how young people become engaged through supportive adults, peers, community organizations, and experiences of discrimination or marginalization. Rather than seeing themselves only as “the future,” participants claim agency in the present. The session emphasizes youth knowledge, neighborhood identity, safe organizing spaces, media representation, rights discourse, and the importance of including young people in civic life.

Andy Clarno’s session, “Policing Precariousness in South Africa and Palestine/Israel,” examines how neoliberal inequality and insecurity produce new forms of urban securitization. Comparing Johannesburg and Jerusalem, Clarno shows how marginalized populations face precarious lives while elites respond through racialized fears of crime, terrorism, and disorder. In South Africa, wealthy residents rely on private security, gated neighborhoods, surveillance, and fortified suburbs to police poor Black communities. In Palestine/Israel, the Israeli state, Palestinian Authority, United States, and other actors coordinate security systems that contain Palestinian populations. The session highlights connections between capitalism, policing, militarization, and resistance.

Sanjeev Vidyarthi’s session examines Jaipur’s effort to become a “world-class heritage city” within broader shifts in Indian urban planning after economic liberalization. Focusing on Jaipur’s master plans, tourism economy, civic pride, and renewed attention to the historic “Pink City,” Vidyarthi traces a shift from postcolonial, state-led planning focused on modern expansion to newer agendas shaped by heritage, private development, regional identity, and local elites. He argues that Jaipur reflects changing relationships between state planning, private actors, newspapers, heritage committees, infrastructure funding, and city identity, raising questions about whether heritage-led planning is transformative or reproduces older power structures.

Deborah Youdell’s session examines Birmingham, U.K. as a superdiverse, supercomplex, and “disassembled” city facing austerity, public service restructuring, and changing forms of local democracy. Drawing on her work with the University of Birmingham’s Public Service Academy, Youdell discusses efforts to connect academic research with city government as Birmingham confronts major funding shortfalls and pressure to redesign public services. She explores tensions between fairness, prosperity, democracy, localism, privatization, co-production, and community responsibility. The session raises critical questions about whether communities can absorb shrinking public services, especially amid rapid demographic change and uneven civic capacity.

Tingwei Zhang’s session examines contemporary urban design in Chinese cities, focusing on rapid urbanization, large-scale redevelopment, new districts, infrastructure projects, and event-driven investments such as the Beijing Olympics and Shanghai World Expo. He highlights the achievements of high-quality projects often designed by leading international firms, while also questioning uneven development, rural-urban migration, resident displacement, overbuilding, loss of agricultural land, and tensions between modernization and Chinese cultural traditions. The session considers whether China’s urban model can inform other developing countries while asking how physical improvements can better support social equity, sustainability, and quality of life for diverse urban and rural populations alike.

José Rivera’s session examines the concept of water commons in the Rio Grande watershed, focusing on water scarcity, climate change, irrigation traditions, and competing urban, agricultural, tribal, environmental, and economic demands in New Mexico. Drawing on the history of western settlement, John Wesley Powell’s watershed-based vision, acequia systems, and contemporary water planning, Rivera highlights tensions between regional growth, Albuquerque’s dependence on imported Colorado River water, declining snowpack, endangered species protections, and proposed development such as Santolina. The session argues for shared regional approaches to water governance that recognize watersheds, community ditches, and long-standing rights as interconnected commons.

Clare Mouat’s session examines Perth and Western Australia through the intertwined realities of mining, urban growth, governance, and civic aspiration. Framed as “red earth realities and blue sky thinking,” the talk explores how Perth’s global-city ambitions are shaped by mineral extraction, corporate headquarters, fly-in/fly-out labor, housing pressures, vulnerability, and uneven community impacts. Mouat highlights the Committee for Perth as a civic change organization that uses evidence-based research, philanthropy, and cross-sector collaboration to influence planning and policy. The session argues for grounded, aspirational governance that balances economic opportunity with social responsibility, sustainability, local knowledge, and practical wisdom in Western Australia today.

Atef Said’s session examines Tahrir Square’s role in the making of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, focusing on how Cairo’s urban geography shaped protest, mobilization, and revolutionary possibility. Drawing on ethnography, interviews, archival research, and his own positionality, Said explores how Tahrir’s location near ministries, parliament, hotels, and symbolic state institutions made it a strategic site for occupation. He also highlights Cairo’s contradictions, marginalized communities, street vendors, police stations, and neighborhood battles as crucial to the uprising. The session ends by questioning how revolutionary public space later became restricted under renewed military rule and surveillance.

Moises Gonzales’s session examines the evolution of irrigation-based urban landscapes in the American Southwest, focusing on Albuquerque, San Antonio, and Los Angeles. Drawing on urban morphology, Spanish-Mexican town planning, acequia systems, plazas, common grazing lands, and later American grid development, Gonzales traces how water infrastructure shaped settlement, land use, and cultural identity. He shows how irrigation landscapes were preserved, erased, buried, or rediscovered as cities modernized. The session highlights tensions between efficiency-driven planning and cultural memory, arguing that restoring rivers, acequias, plazas, and historic landscapes can help cities reconnect with identity, ecology, and community values.