This project investigates the spatial factors influencing violence patterns in contested urban environments. It explores whether there is a relationship between urban configurations and patterns of warfare or terrorism, with a focus on Paris and Mumbai, revealing insights into the interplay of integration, visibility, and landmark proximity in urban security dynamics.

The IAS Vulnerability Seminar Series hosted a panel that touched on the ways in which visibility can be empowering – exposing the reality of sexual violence, or giving a voice and platform to disadvantaged groups – but also how visibility can sometimes leave women and others vulnerable to various forms of harassment or abuse. This event was chaired by Allison Deutch (IAS, UCL).

This talk considered the vulnerability of those assigned to a category which most human groups treat with angry revulsion: the stupid. Professor Steven Connor will suggest that stupidity is more tightly than ever twinned with shame in our growing epistemocracy. But if the power to shame is toxically potent, the condition of shame, though the most exquisitely painful form of vulnerability, may also harbour surprising, and dangerous powers of insurgence. Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English and Fellow of Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge. From October 2018 he will be Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). He is a writer, critic and broadcaster, who has published books on many topics, including Dickens, Beckett, Joyce, value, ventriloquism, skin, flies and air.

IAS Vulnerability Seminar: Vulnerability and Censorship

The law is traditionally centered around the norm of an able-bodied, competent, independent, self-sufficient and autonomous man. This creates a legal systems which privileges the values of autonomy, privacy and bodily integrity.

A description of the work (Abstract): Since the beginning of the pandemic many flaws in the way cities around the world function were made visible and the FAO identified the urban food provisioning system as one of these (Khim, 2020). COVID-19 is far from being the first biological hazard but in current times it is the first that has gravely affected all stages of the food system including, production, processing, packaging, distribution, retail, and consumption. More frequent climatic hazards have been studied and addressed through disaster risk reduction usually at the level of agricultural production such as unpredictable and extreme weather leading to failed harvests. Therefore, this paper combines the fields of disaster risk reduction and food system planning to build back better after the COVID-19 biological hazard in developing cities such as Lima, Peru and more particularly in the middle-low to low-income district of Villa Maria del Triunfo. This combination is based on the idea that disasters can be defined as the impact of a hazard on a human system which can be a food system and that literature in both fields mention resilience as a key concept to build back better. Throughout the case study assessing pre-disposing disaster risk to COVID-19 in the food system shed light on the unequal exposure, vulnerability, and capacity to act to disaster risk in Lima. It also created space to look at international examples of post-disaster recovery strategies in food systems of other cities and the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s most recent resilience framework called the City-Region Food system. The strategies suggested for the case of Villa Maria del Triunfo are transferable to cities that have similar issues but on the other hand they are also largely dependent on the will of cities and their actors to act on these matters. Thus, this paper can be seen as advocating for the implementation of food systems planning in disaster risk reduction as an important step for urban development.

Climate change is already threatening the lives and livelihoods of Yangon’s residents, with low-income informal settlements experiencing high levels of vulnerability, while receiving little protection in the face of spatially violent development, policy and planning. This dissertation aims to situate current climate change adaptation needs within the context of historical and contemporary spatial violence that continues to impact everyday lived realities in low-income settlements. Spatial violence in the form of displacement, dislocation and dispossession threatens to continue along the current trajectory perpetuating high levels of vulnerability. With so called ‘green’ development putting those most vulnerable into further states of precarity, this dissertation utilises a Feminist Political Ecology lens to explore the reality for women in Yangon, who despite traditional narratives of relative equality, experience high levels of vulnerability due to their gendered experiences. As a reaction to perpetuating spatial violence and threats of further precarity, women and community groups in Yangon are emerging as agents of their own adaptation in the form of community housing and infrastructure upgrading initiatives. Without acknowledgement for the current experience of spatial violence in the city, and the reactions of the most vulnerable communities, adaptation that aims to challenge the structures behind current vulnerability will not occur. This dissertation found that while there is a lack of care and acknowledgement for the reality of the most marginalised communities, they respond to threats of further precarity with agency, that if supported, could lead to transformative adaptation for the city of Yangon.

The Institute of Advanced Studies hosted a conversation with Elisabeth Lebovici to discuss her new book Ce que le sida m'a fait: art et activisme à la fin du XXe siècle (‘What AIDS has done to me. Art and Activism at the End of the 20th Century’, Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2017).