Event 1: Between the Ballot and the Blockade

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Monday 28 September | 5:30-7:00 PM | Room E403, NYU Shanghai New Bund Campus

Two recent books on democracy, crowds and representation in urban India meet in conversation. Lisa Björkman’s Drama of Democracy: Political Representation in Mumbai (Minnesota, 2025) follows the everyday theatre of political work in the city; Lisa Mitchell’s Hailing the State: Indian Democracy between Elections (Duke, 2023) reconceives collective assembly – sit-ins, strikes, blockades – as fundamental to how Indian democracy actually functions between elections. Together they ask how people hold officials to account and claim inclusion when the ballot is not in play.

Event 2: How to Study a City: Methods for Urban Research

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Tuesday 29 September | 3:45-5:15 PM | Room W516, NYU Shanghai New Bund Campus

Three urban ethnographers on how one actually studies a city: gaining access, following people and infrastructures, working across languages, and knowing when a method has stopped serving the question. Aimed at students thinking about fieldwork of their own, in Shanghai or elsewhere.

Event 3: Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power and the City

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Tuesday 29 September | 5:30-7:00 PM | Room E403, NYU Shanghai New Bund Campus

Whose cities do we mean when we talk about the urban age, and who gets to say what a city is? For a century the theory came from London, Chicago and Paris. Colin McFarlane, a leading figure in comparative urbanism, asks what happens when Mumbai, Shanghai and Lagos are treated not as exceptions but as the places where the urban future is being made.

Colin McFarlane is Professor of Geography at Durham University. He is the author of Learning the City (2011), Fragments of the City (2021), and Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (2023), winner of the 2025 Global Cities Book Award.