A series of critical and interdisciplinary discussions on essential and pressing problems concerning urban issues in the ‘global South’ kicks off next month at University of Leuven, Belgium, and CHR Next Generation Researcher Kim Gurney will be an active part of these conversations. The series of events titled Cities in Development: Between Dystopia and Utopia, is part of the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Development and Cultures debate series at the University of Leuven, where Invited speakers share alternative readings of these urban spaces, acknowledging tensions and conflicts as well as opportunities. It aims to ’provide n-depth theoretical and applied knowledge of city development in the Global South, along with the different dynamics that currently shape these urban sites’. Topics covered will include cities of exception, extraction, the right to the city, colonial pasts and urban futures, and art in public spaces.

At that final lecture on 10 December, Kim Gurney from the CHR will speak alongside Sandrine Colard, curator of the Lubumbashi Biennale and art historian from Rutgers University. Special attention goes to the specific ways in which city dwellers’ agency invents urban futures and counters common dystopian understandings.