December Research-in-Progress Seminar: Speculation, Disruption, and Desire in Heritage and Urban Futures

The Open Cities Platform brings you another edition of their Monthly Research Seminars, an engaging and collaborative space designed for Research Masters, PhD candidates, and all UU researchers and students from the departments of Media and Culture Studies, Anthropology, Human Geography and Spatial Planning, and beyond. This month, the Open Cities research-in-progress seminar has the pleasure to present the work of dr. May Ee Wong (Utrecht University) and Charlotte Vekemans (University Ghent). 

The Speculative and Speculating Cities of Planetary Urban Futures - dr. May Ee Wong

This book chapter explains ‘Planetary Urban Futures’ through a survey of speculative cities mostly located in Asia and the Middle East (such as NEOM, Gardens by the Bay and Forest City) and their self-organizing ‘Smart-Eco’ rhetorical tropes and media forms which have emerged in the last 50 years. It examines the scalar infrastructural nature of such urbanism and how ‘planetary urban futures’ revisit neo-Malthusian anxieties and utopian projects from the 1960s to 70s, a period when notions of planetary habitability were being formulated through speculations of ‘the city’ in response to anxieties over overpopulation, post-WWII decolonization and housing resettlement, the possibilities of space exploration and the recognition of a global ecological crisis. 

May Ee Wong is Assistant Professor of Urban Mobile Media in the Department of Media and Culture Studies in Utrecht University. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the “Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data” (2022-2024) project with Jussi Parikka and Paolo Patelli at Aarhus University, and in the Asian Urbanisms cluster at Asia Research Institute (2022). Her research questions center on how notions and forms of technology, the 'environment', the past and the future are co-constituted and transformed through modes of design and media as well as projective and speculative logics, narrative and discourse. Her work engages the intersections of contemporary architectural and design history and theory, critical geography, feminist Science Technology and Society (STS) studies, environmental media and humanities and visual and media culture and aesthetics. She has contributed to Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (Avery Review/Columbia GSAPP), Architecture_MPS and Words of Weather: A Glossary (2022). She is working on a book project tentatively titled Planetary Urban Futures: The Urban as Infrastructural Frontier.

Desire Lines and Disruptions: Heritage Development as Political Projects in Madaba, Jordan - Charlotte Vekemans

Following paradigmatic development practices across the globe, heritage development projects in Jordan have tried to open up new tourism markets around heritage sites. Connections are key elements in these development projects: infrastructure to allow visitors to move frictionlessly from international ports of arrival to their desired destinations, accomodation at primary touristic stops, trails that connect different hot spots, but also social connections: English language skills and hospitality practices that allow tourists to feel at home, tour guides who can interpret the sites, cultural performances to introduce visitors to the exciting exotic culture.  

These connections, I argue, are part of a dialectical mode of governing: heritage development is a vehicle for donor agencies and the Jordanian government to reorganize places and people in a way that fit political projects (see also: Lenner, 2015). But connections are equally disruptions: the delineation of sites, the opening up of touristic markets for visitors – they form gaps and distances at the same time: alienating some from sites while privileging access for others. In this paper, I examine Madaba, where successive heritage projects since the 1980s have transformed the city. By tracing the material and social connections created through these projects, I explore the future-oriented political projects underpinning heritage development and the contestations that arise in its wake. 

Charlotte Vekemans is a doctoral candidate in Conflict & Development Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. Her research deals with the political economy of heritage development in Jordan and builds on a critical genealogy of heritage and ethnographic fieldwork on contemporary heritage development projects in Madaba and Amman, Jordan. In 2021 she was an ACOR fellow and her research has been supported by serveral FWO fellowships. She also conducted research at KU Leuven on colonial and military history, for which she was awarded the Flemish scriptieprijs. Her research interests lie in heritage studies, politics of history, development politics, governmentality, and new materialism.