City Seminar Roundtable #2

Join us for the City Seminar roundtables this term where we'll engage in a series of discussions on spatial politics.

Nicholas Frayne

Heritage Inaction: deferred futures and political power in Kenya

With a focus on the former tortures in the basement of Nyayo House in downtown Nairobi, this brief talk discusses how the deferral of memorialisation in Kenya operates as a distinctly postcolonial and temporal mode of politics. It unpacks how the legacies of past state violence are negotiated and potentially foreclosed through the performance of future action, ultimately leading to the delimitation of political transformation and the restriction of memory activism as a space where claims for justice are meaningfully articulated.

Uzayr Agha

Watering Wastelands - The Punjab Colony Manual of 1926

This presentation focuses on the Punjab Colony Manual of 1926 as both a technical document and a social instrument. I argue that the manual was a means by which the British colonial state systematically organised land, water, and social life in the canal colonies of western Punjab, one of the largest resettlement schemes in the region. In a close reading of the document alongside the broader context of irrigation expansion in the Indus Basin, I show how it became a tool of governance and demonstrate how its rules for planning, sanitation, mapping, and property decisively shaped new rural orders and design conventions.

Madeleine Miller

The East India Company and London’s Urbanism, 1729-1858

My talk provides a brief overview on London’s eighteenth and nineteenth century urban development through the lens of the East India Company. I focus on how concentrations of commercial power, capital, and elite networks shaped urban space by analysing the property holdings and investments of both the Company and its Court of Directors. Using network analysis and spatial mapping, I reconstruct the Company’s footprint across the city to trace how institutional wealth became embedded in new economic and social geographies. In doing so, the project reframes urban growth as a layered process heavily shaped by corporate influence, finance, and governance, revealing the complex entanglements of power, class, and space in the making of modern London.

The City Seminar series explores current topics in the field of urban studies with a commitment to intradisciplinary perspectives, critical approaches to research, and exploring the relationships between research and practice.