UrbanoScenes sets out to explore, through a post-colonial epistemological lens, the construction, reproduction and contestation of imaginaries of urbanisation—focusing on Portugal, Angola and their transnational relations. It does so by focusing on how the society/nature dichotomy—and its derivatives, eg colony/metropolis, urban/rural, human/technology, modern/pre-modern, development/underdevelopment, North/South—informs dominant imaginaries and (re)produce socio-spatial relations of power. The working hypothesis being that the forms of (structural, cultural, state) violence/injustice that are inherent to global urbanisation are legitimised, reproduced and justified by the normative framing provided by such imaginaries, UrbanoScenes investigates alternative imaginaries co-existing with dominant ones. It does so from genealogical, comparative and future-oriented perspectives, building at the intersection of three fields of research so far largely disconnected from each other: - critiques of the ever-increasing influence of urban imaginaries (eg green, healthy, smart, creative, safe) in urban policy/discourse; - debates in post-colonial and critical urban studies on the global nature of the process of urbanisation; - world-ecology critiques of the persistence of the society/nature dichotomy in discourses around the Anthropocene. UrbanoScenes has three general goals: i) theoretical, to (re-)theorise urbanisation by unpacking the socio-political centrality played by imaginaries of urbanisation through a postcolonial perspective; ii) normative, to offer future-oriented insights to rethink urbanisation paradigms in the Anthropocene; and iii) policy-relevant, to produce knowledge useful to reframe urban policy. These goals are pursued through three specific objectives: a) to set out a genealogy of post-colonial imaginaries of urbanisation, as they are evident in urban theory, policy, fiction and architecture, with a multi-scalar focus, from global ideas to local actualisat...

The project unpacks, analyses, and mobilises against each other two key but relatively understudied concepts of contemporary urban politics: comfort and the urban commons. Three are the main hypotheses: [1] that the urban commons are the battleground of contemporary urban politics; [2] that the politics of comfort directly and indirectly frame this ‘battle’, in spatial, normative and aesthetic sense, shaping the way in which urban commons are ordered, regulated, consumed, inhabited, and valorised; [3] that the turbulent encounter between comfort and commons in the city is an invaluable, and yet so far overlooked dimension for investigating the urban conceptually, critically and strategically. These hypotheses are pursued via genealogical exploration, critical analysis, and empirical investigation.

The recent ‘spatial turn’ in humanities deeply affected the fields of urban planning, security, marketing and law, modifying dramatically the way urban space is perceived, designed and controlled. What is the relation between these changes and the current global wave of social protests? How does urban space allow for, modify or prevent the expression of protests, and how protests in turn affect and modify its social and material form? The project addresses these questions by: [a] elaborating an innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical framework to unpack the urban dimension of social protest; [b] testing it through a comparative study of social protests vis-à-vis an exceptional event (the Rio de Janeiro Olympics) and an ‘everyday exceptionality’ (the ongoing crisis and related ‘austerity’ measures in Lisbon); [c] creating a transdisciplinary research network to translate [a] and [b] into an operative strategy to integrate the emancipatory potential of social protest within urban policy frameworks.