Duty of Care Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Roberto Rocco and Hugo Lopez interview Titus Kaloki on addressing spatial justice through inclusive urban planning. The episode has three main topics: (1) Smart City vs Just City, (2) The idea of transformative change-making, and (3) the work for a socially just public transport.

Titus Kaloki is Programme Coordinator at FES _the Friedrich Ebert Stitftung for Social Democracy_ Kenya Office, where he leads the Just City programme, which engages the concept of a social and inclusive just city to facilitate innovative discussions among political decision makers, civil society representatives and others on issues such as affordable housing, fair and clean public transport, and meaningful civic engagement in urban spaces.

FES is the oldest political foundation in Germany with a rich tradition in social democracy dating back to its birth in 1925. The foundation owes its formation and its mission to the political legacy of its namesake Friedrich Ebert, the first democratically elected German President. The work of FES focuses on the core ideas and values of social democracy – freedom, justice and solidarity. FES is a non-profit institution that organises their work autonomously and independently.

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At this episode, we have Professor Romola Sanyal from the London School of Economics, who will talk about “Migration and diversity in the city”. Professor Sanyal’s research focuses on the relationship between forced migration and urbanisation. In one strand of her research, she looks at how refugees and other forced migrants become ‘city makers’ through building and inhabiting urban spaces. This work had been conducted in India and Lebanon, through the study of Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and Partition refugee colonies in Calcutta. 

Here, she explores how the act of [building itself] was a form of politics and how it challenged efforts by humanitarian organisations and host governments to marginalise and depoliticize refugees. She continues this work by studying how refugees come to [inhabit and make homes] whilst being displaced and living in legally precarious circumstances. A second strand of this work looks at the geopolitics of humanitarian knowledge production, particularly on urban refugees. Without further ado, let’s listen to Professor Sanyal.

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In the first episode, Professor Faranak Miraftab will talk about “Insurgent Practices of Hope and Care for Humane Urbanism". She is a Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a focus on Community Development for Social Justice and Transnational Planning. Her scholarship is situated at the intersection of sociology, geography, planning, and feminist studies, using case study and ethnographic methodologies. Her research concerns social and institutional aspects of urban development and planning, that address basic human needs, including housing and urban infrastructure and the services that support them. She is particularly interested in the global and local development processes and contingencies involved in the formation of the city and citizens’ struggles for dignified livelihood — namely, how groups disadvantaged by class, gender, race, and ethnicity mobilise for resources such as shelter, basic infrastructure, and services and how institutional arrangements facilitate or frustrate provision and access to such vital urban resources. Professor Miraftab is the author of a number of seminal papers on insurgency, a concept that she explores in her lecture.

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In this episode, we hear the initiator and host of this podcast: Roberto Rocco. He is an Associate Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy at Bouwkunde. Roberto is trained as an architect and spatial planner with a master’s in planning by the University of São Paulo and a PhD by TU Delft. Roberto specialises in governance for the built environment and social sustainability, as well as issues of governance in regional planning and design. This includes issues of spatial justice as a crucial dimension of sustainability transitions. 

He has also published extensively about informal urbanisation in the Global South and he does research on how informal institutions influence and shape planning at the local level. He is a consultant for the Union for the Mediterranean and has recently drafted the UfM Action Plan for Sustainable Urbanisation 2040.

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This session addresses the concept of governance and how planners and designers can use the concept to plan better, more inclusive cities. Frequently, in discussions about urban development and urban planning, you’ll hear the word “governance.” You will probably wonder what “governance” is and how it is different from “government.” The “government” is an imprecise shortcut we use to refer to the public sector, or the ensemble of levels and branches of government with all their departments, divisions, authorities, and so on. Countries and cities have governments, but the way they are “governed” includes much more than formal governments. “In empirical terms, governance refers to a shift in public organization since the 1980s. The world of government has changed. Increasingly governments rely on private and voluntary sector actors to manage and deliver services. The State enters contracts with other organizations, for example, to manage prisons and to provide training to the unemployed. The state forms partnerships with other organizations, for example, to build roads and rail lines and to deliver humanitarian aid. Whereas the government had consisted in no small measure of bureaucratic hierarchies, the new governance gives greater scope to markets and networks.” Bevir (2012)

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