Planning collective liberation?

Various interventions in urban studies and critical geography have framed commons, people, and public services as infrastructures, emphasizing the spatial foundations of collective life. Yet beyond the metaphor, the role of urban infrastructure—and spatial politics more broadly—in sustaining cooperative lifeworlds remains, from a historical perspective, deeply ambivalent. While planning and urban design are essential to sustaining the complex social and material fabric of cities, they have also often sought to inhibit or neutralize collective appropriations of urban space, self-management, and bottom-up trajectories of urbanization. Drawing on his book, Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning, Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago will explore the intersection of the built environment with processes of commoning and dispossession, and examine how planning and design seek to shape this nexus in ways that subordinate social reproduction to economic imperatives. Developing this critical perspective, the talk asks what kinds of planning—and what approaches to urban theory and planning history—might contribute to a project that understands urbanization as a basis of egalitarian emancipation and collective empowerment.

With: Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago
Moderation: Michael Klein / ÖGFA

Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago is a critical urbanist, planning historian, architect, and Professor at the School of Architecture (ETSAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). After working for over a decade as a professional urban planner, his academic research now explores the intersection of urban studies, critical theory, and social history, with a focus on capitalism, planning genealogies, and collective life. 
Author of Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and editor of Neil Brenner: Critical Urban Theory and the Politics of Scale (2017). His work has been published in book chapters and leading international journals, including Antipode, The Architectural Review, and Urban Studies.