Faranak Miraftab

Materiality of Place and Politics of In-placement: A Critique of Metro-centric Globalization Scholarship
Faranak Miraftab
Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

In this presentation I stress the entanglement of local and global in processes that shape cities and their politics through the experience of an often overlooked space in urban scholarship on globalization—a non-metropolitan area. I argue the metro-centric knowledge that is produced about globalization has created dangerous silences about the experience of a range of places that are intensely global, shaping and shaped by transnational relations, but often misrepresented as left behind by globalization. By examining globalization of production and social reproduction through the experience of migration in a non-metropolitan area, I seek to show (1) the complexity and entanglement of local-global relations, and (2) the importance of place, what I call materiality of place, for the kind of politics it produces. To address these points, I draw on the case study of my book Global Heartland (2016), which examines these processes through the experience of the US heartland (the bread basket of the country).

The Lectures in Planning Series (LiPS) is an initiative of the Urban Planning program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

All lectures are free and open to the public. For more information or to make program suggestions, email lipscolumbiaplanning@gmail.com.