Bringing Lefebvre to urban planning in Geneva
CITY INSTITUTE RESEARCH SEMINAR:
Abstract:
This presentation brings together two scholars whose research is focused on or connected to urban planning issues in Geneva, Switzerland. Karine Duplan will discuss how social inclusion is taken into account by public policies in relation to gender and sexual minorities. Drawing on the conceptual framework of Lefebvre’s right to the city, she will show how queering the right to the city can only be achieved articulating regional and municipal levels of governance with the demands of community activists, and not without tensions. Sébastien Lambelet will discuss the way the Canton of Geneva has relied on the Swiss-French border and French cross-border workers to maintain an urban development model that is highly concentric. In this vein, Sébastien will argue that Geneva represents an exception to the dynamic, relational and heterogeneous conception of cities defended by Lefebvre and planetary urbanization scholars.
Speakers:
Karine Duplan
Karine Duplan (PhD) is an urban social and cultural geographer at the University of Geneva (CH) dedicated to issues of social inclusion and the right to the city, with specific expertise in gender, sexuality, and migration in globalized urban contexts. Using participatory urban ethnography, her current research project explores the everyday spatialities of queer exiles to allow for a closer account of the voices of marginalised subjects while giving insights for public policies in search for spatial justice.
Sébastien Lambelet
Sébastien Lambelet has joined the Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change (EUC) and The CITY Institute as a postdoctoral fellow since February 2024, under the supervision of Prof. Roger Keil. Before that, he was a lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the University of Geneva (Switzerland) where he also obtained his PhD in Political Science in late 2019. Sébastien’s research focuses on urban and metropolitan governance, policy studies, cross-border metropolitan areas, land-use planning and land policies (especially in relation to the recent emergence of net land neutrality objectives).
