The Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies, 5th edition: What’s the urban worth? revaluing the value of urban life
26-28 November 2025 - Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa (ICS-ULisboa), Lisbon
UTH – Urban Transitions Hub and AESOP – Young Academics Network
The Urban Transitions Hub and the AESOP Young Academics Network, with the support of Research Group SHIFT: Environment, Territory and Society of ICS-ULisboa, will host the fifth edition of the Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies (November 26-28th, 2025).
Some 30 PhD candidates and early-career scholars will have the opportunity to present and discuss their research projects and/or findings during a 3-days event organised as a space of exchange, debate and learning.
Keynote speakers
- Maan Barua (University of Cambridge, UK)
- Andrea Mubi Brighenti (University of Trento, Italy)
Call for Proposal
What’s the urban worth? revaluing the value of urban life
Life in contemporary cities unfolds as a constant negotiation around problems of value. From the daily improvisation of urban dwellers to the financial flows driving planetary urbanisation, nearly every facet of urban existence can be said to depend, implicitly or explicitly, on valuation – that is, on assigning, defining or betting on how much things, movement, space, time and experience are worth it. From real estate speculations to reputation economy, from platform urbanism to urban branding, from grassroot collectives to quality-of-life policing, from cultural policies to ecosystem services – urban worlds are incessantly made and unmade by processes, imaginaries and practices of value creation, appropriation, extraction and destruction across different domains, scales, and rhythms.
Cities have long been tied to the pursuit of a better life, from utopian visions to the contemporary promise of a freer, wealthier, and more meaningful life. Regardless of the inequality, precariousness, stress, and violence that often characterise urban existence, cities keep holding this promise, translated in a widening array of imaginaries (smart, safe, healthy, green, beautiful, creative, resilient, etc.) that feed urban policies, aesthetics and politics. Cities, however, are also quintessential sites of extraction, where this promise is constantly bent to the logics of capital, and where the value that human and nonhuman life incessantly generates is economised and sequestered through violent processes of gentrification, securitisation, touristification, or financialisation. New technologies amplify these dynamics, dramatically expanding the frontiers of value extraction while entrenching surveillance, precarious labour, and dispossession.
The complexity of this process is only partially captured by this drama of creation and dispossession, however. Before being extracted, value must be defined and measured, depending on moral ideals of what is good; cultural images of what is meaningful; ecological metrics of what is sustainable; economic imperatives of what is worth it. A wide array of indicators like liveability indexes, for instance, organise cities and neighbourhoods in simplified hierarchies that determine which spaces and lives are worth living, and which aren’t. Besides the inherent inequalities and structural blindness these charts betray, much of the value that urban dwellers daily produce fall under the radar of such institutional and epistemological regimes, with often dramatic consequences. At its core, of course, this is a question of power: who defines what counts as valuable, and who benefits from these definitions? Understanding how urban value is generated, defined, extracted or erased, therefore, is an urgent epistemological and political matter.
How do contemporary processes of valuation and valorisation shape notions of urban worth, and what practices or forms of value are overlooked or excluded in these processes? How do grassroots collectives, experimental practices, and alternative valuation systems challenge or queer dominant frameworks of urban value? And, what can they reveal about overlooked economic, social, or political worth? In what ways can we speculatively reimagine urban value beyond taken-for-granted notions of liveability and habitability, while avoiding the mere romanticisation of alternatives? What methodological innovations or experimentations are needed to capture and attend to diverse forms of urban value, including non-human ones, and how might these methods resist or repurpose dominant forms of valuation? What is the urban worth, and how might we reimagine the value of urban life to support emancipatory urban futures?
These are just some among the many questions the workshop invites to engage with, encouraging participants to reflect on the role of value in shaping urban life. Open to the widest possible variety of topics or themes, we invite participants to explore the question of value conceptually, epistemologically, methodologically or politically, through the interdisciplinary lenses of urban studies, geography, spatial policy and planning, political ecology, sociology, architecture, anthropology, and beyond. We are eager to engage with projects and papers that delve into the concept of value —broadly understood—by exploring the way in which its politics, economy and aesthetics shape the contemporary urban condition.
Workshop activities will include:
- Plenary keynote sessions.
- Breakout parallel sessions – divided in groups, participants will present their paper and receive comments by a mentor and other participants.
- Wrap-up session with discussion on lessons learned.
- Q&A session on “academic survival” (strategies and tips for academic publishing, and post-PhD challenges).
Who can attend the workshop
The workshop is open to PhD students and early-career scholars in the fields of urban studies, planning and geography, and all the social sciences and humanities with an interest on space.
A minimum of 8 seats will be reserved to members of the AESOP Young Academics, please mention in your motivation letter whether you are a member.
Application and registration
Applications open from February 24th to April 15th, 2025.
Send an abstract for your presentation (max 500 words) and a short letter of motivation to
Decisions will be sent by May 15th, 2025.
Registration by June 30th, 2025.
Submission of long abstract or short paper (max 3,000 words, to be distributed among participants) by September 15thth, 2025.
Registration fee: 200€.
We will be able to offer at least two fee waivers and two scholarships of €500. Thus, if you have no research funds and are interested in applying for a fee waiver or a bursary, please mention this in your motivation letter, briefly explaining the reasons why (priority will be given to scholars from low-income countries and/or from research institutions with little or no research funds).
Organising committee
- Lavínia Pereira (coordinator, ICS-ULisboa)
- Andrea Pavoni (coordinator, DINAMIA’CET, ISCTE)
- Marco Allegra (ICS-ULisboa)
- Luisa Rossini (ICS-ULisboa)
- Simone Tulumello (ICS-ULisboa)
See more information here.
