Aspirational Urbanism and the Recodification of Defiance (ASPIRA)
Research Project | 1 Project Members
The function of a blank sheet of A4 paper in a context of censorship reflects the need to recognize new forms of defiance. As speech is being monitored through different technologies and in a range of arenas from the public square to social media and across university campuses, defiance takes new forms of symbolic critique. In the project “Aspirational Urbanism and the Recodification of Defiance (ASPIRA), recognizing defiance contributes to the aim of conceptualizing aspirational urbanism as a way of understanding the function of alterity (alternative futures, speculative possibilities) in shaping cities. Rather than explaining urban change in Hong Kong and Taipei exclusively in terms of Tiger economics or the developmentalist state, beyond techno-positivism and growth machine dogmas, ASPIRA recognizes defiance as the agency of urban residents in contesting perceived inevitabilities. The project builds on theoretical work on urban futures, understanding cities as sites for planning, imagining and representing futures. It also recognizes the unequal capacities and risks involved, highlighting the “cruel” ascriptions to optimism and the potentially devastating consequences of aspiration. ASPIRA’s approach identifying defiance by centering on visual analysis grounds aspirational urbanism, rescaling the object of urban theory towards everyday micro-practices.
The SNSF Starting Grant project began January 2025 and is hosted by the Urban Studies Unit at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Basel.
