Prof. Dr. Julie Ren

Research Project  | 4 Project Members

"Aspirational Urbanism and Everyday City Life (ASPIRA)” is an SNSF Starting Grant Project led by Prof. Dr. Julie Ren. It began in January 2025 and is hosted by Urban Studies at the University of Basel

About ASPIRA

Aspirational Urbanism and Everyday City Life (ASPIRA)This project explores the everyday voices of city life to uncover the aspirations residents have for the future of their cities. Residents’ desires to emigrate or their willingness to stay, the shades of their silences and their humor, the narration and reading of everyday materialities like the pedestrian streetscape or urban cultures associated with food, carries with it the possibility to interpret voice as not only subjective, but also material and aesthetic. Understanding the mundane details of everyday life as a structuring force in shaping cities of the future bears its own strengths and limitations; for instance, the function of materials may not be immediately evident and may hold different meanings for different subjects. Everyday urban life is loaded with symbolic meaning, an empirical wellspring. Recognizing the structures of everyday urban life contributes to the theoretical aim of conceptualizing aspirational urbanism as a way of understanding the function of alterity (alternative futures, speculative possibilities) in shaping cities. Beyond explaining urban change in Hong Kong and Taipei in terms of tiger economics or the developmentalist state, beyond techno-positivism and growth machine dogmas, ASPIRA recognizes everyday life as embedded with micropractices and symbols that reflect the agency of urban residents in questioning perceived inevitabilities. It builds on theoretical work about urban futures, understanding cities as sites for planning, imagining and representing futures. A theory of aspirational urbanism delves into an important tension between three entangled strands of urban analysis 1) it recognizes the desire for alternative possibilities embedded in everyday urban life 2) yet the capacity for these aspirations is not equally shared by all residents and 3) the stakes of unequal capacities highlight the “cruel” ascriptions to optimism. That aspiration can also have devastating consequences tempers its emancipatory potential. New ways of studying everyday urban life imply advancing visual and digital methods. Global travel restrictions have raised interest in these methods, which serve as the primary source of empirical material. Materials include archival objects and photos, documentation of online discussions and co-production of new visual representations. The analysis of urban everyday practices and symbols across time within Hong Kong and Taipei and comparatively between these cities generates insights about the possibility to aspire beyond the individual case. A relational approach to comparison shows how Taipei and Hong Kong are shaped by mobilities of people, cultures, ideas, resources connecting these cities rather than isolating them in historical silos. Methods including go-alongs, photo co-production, photo survey and creative mapping, as well as the engagement of expert collaborators in multiple symposia will provide empirical breadth of materials and interpretive depth in analyzing them. ASPIRA’s approach of studying urban life by centering on visual analysis grounds aspirational urbanism, rescaling the object of urban theory towards everyday micro-practices. Along the way, it advances research methods in terms of protecting interlocutors and creating secure pathways for data collection, transfer and storage. The relevance of this project is expansive, extending to many other settings necessitating different forms of agency, and new ways of researching it.