Constructing solidarities for humane urbanisms: Stories of radical care, hope, and just futures

***Our online platform will go live in Fall 2024.

Constructing solidarities for humane urbanisms is a multilingual Open Access platform where urban movements and grassroots organizations among marginalized communities share their stories of radical care, hope, and imagination. Through this multimedia website, available in languages of participating movements, we co-create knowledge among activists positioned within academia and among marginalized communities to understand how urban movements catalyze a collective imagination of alternative futures—what we see as the most recent front of anticolonial struggle. We refer to this platform as “Citizens’ Commons” – a space of sharing that contains digital stories coproduced, curated and narrated by locally situated and grounded movements within a trans-local network of activists to understand how urban movements open possible futures through practices of care and reciprocity, nurturing hope and activating imagination of alternatives. This is a space of common learning, exchange and organizing. A virtual space, this website is also a means of producing popular education material for activists and community members who are building alternative futures to the contemporary dominant bully urbanism. Digital stories of movements available in their own voices and language of viewers’ choice seek to foster transnational solidarities for humane urbanism where life, not profit, is at the center of policy decisions. We launch this website with the experiences of marginalized communities in South Africa, Brazil, Spain, and the US, but will include new voices and stories of movements that build humane urbanism in other global locations and through distinct practices of care.  Through horizontally and vertically reciprocal and redistributive methodologies, this project and its representative website offers a multimedia multilingual platform whereby movements coproduce their stories and share knowledge about how they find hope and how this helps them organize. If you are interested in lending your story and voice to this website, please contact us.  

Team members:

Co-PIs at UIUC

Faranak Miraftab (Urban and Regional Planning) UIUC

Ken Salo (Urban and Regional Planning) UIUC

Atyeh Ashtari (Urban and Regional Planning) UIUC

Magdalena Novoa (Urban and Regional Planning) UIUC

Victor Font (Cinema and Media Studies) UIUC

Co-PIs outside UIUC

Efadul Huq (Smith College)

Sara Bassett (Arizona State University)

Koni Benson (University of Western Cape),

Greg Ruiters (University of Western Cape),

Clarissa Freitas (Universidade Federal de Ceara, Fortaleza),

Ricardo Nascimento (UNILAB),

Fabricio Leal (ETTERN Urban Lab at UFRJ),

Giselle Tanaka (ETTERN Urban Lab at UFRJ),

Carlos Vainer (ETTERN Urban Lab at UFRJ),

José Ricardo Vargas de Faria (UFPR),

Jordi González Guzmán (UPF Barcelona)

Rob Robinson (New School)

Community-based project participants

To be showcased on the live platform.