Thursday 11th June, 15:00 CET / 2:00 pm GMT, online seminar
The Fairville project team invites you to this upcoming session of Dialogues in Coproduction, an online public seminar series dedicated to the co-production of just cities. Our ambition is to help consolidate an international community of practice interested in exploring and learning from real-life experiments addressing the growing social, spatial, environmental and political inequalities in our cities. The Dialogues in Coproduction are open to residents, activists, academics and professionals, alongside other actors from civil society organisations and local governments.
Project: Fairville About this session
Various forms of co-production in urban planning have been in practice for at least half a century, supporting grassroots urban development in France and Brazil. These initiatives emerged historically in the 1970s through collaboration among various actors: committed urban professionals, students, mobilized residents, and housing rights activists, in very distinct neighborhoods in both countries: from working-class neighborhoods in northern France to self-built settlements on the outskirts of São Paulo. In contexts of metropolization and planned urban renewal and even the financialization of housing, how has co-production enabled us to challenge residential inequalities and forms of citizenship, and to overcome obstacles to democracy over the past several decades? As part of this session, we will welcome several French and Brazilian members of the Franco-Brazilian research project ANR-Fapesp Copolis to mark the launch of two books published in France and Brazil, and a special issue of the journal Participations. This project and these publications will be presented in light of three central questions:
- Does co-production help maintain countervailing powers and take urban mobilizations seriously in order to shape the city and fight “for the city”?
- What is the role of academic and professional intermediaries in these co-productions, balancing guidance and support for mobilized collectives in contexts of precariousness and repression?
- How do these practices challenge the ways in which demands and actions for a more just city are collectively developed and advanced?
To discuss this we are pleased to welcome the following speakers :
- João Sette Whitaker Ferreira, Architect-Urbanist, and economist, Professor and research director at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, member of the LabHab research group at the same university
- Francisco de Assis Comarú, Engineer, Professor, Universidade Federal do ABC and coordinator of the LabJuta research group (UFABC)
- Lara Ferreira, Architect, postdoctoral researcher (CEFAVELA / UFABC)
- Agnès Deboulet, Professor of Sociology, Alter-LAVUE – University of Paris 8; Scientific Coordinator of Fairville
- Antonio Delfini, Sociologist, Ceraps – University of Lille; activist Pas Sans Nous
- Philippe Urvoy, Historian, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Université Paris Nanterre. Member of the Mosaïques research team (LAVUE – Université Paris Nanterre) and the Cosmópolis laboratory (Federal University of Minas Gerais).
Facilitation : Pedro Gomes, Assistant Professor, l’Ecole des ingénieurs de la Ville de Paris; Lab’URBA – Université Gustave Eiffel
The seminar will take place on Thursday 11th June at 15:00 CET / 2:00 pm GMT, via Zoom.
Registration via the following link.
The seminar will be held in English and Portuguese, with live interpretation (English to Portuguese & Portuguese to English).
In addition, please find enclosed a poster for this seminar- which may be also downloaded via this link.
We look forward to seeing you there,
The Fairville team
Fairville Website
For more information on the publications :
Solidarités et coproductions urbainesUniversités et associations en soutien aux mobilisations habitantesCoproduire la ville par le bas, perspectives franco-brésiliennesProduzir juntos espaços e saberes: um olhar para a ação da universidade em bairros populares – CoPolisCoproduire des savoirs urbains à partir des mobilisations en France et au BrésilDialogues in co-production
The Dialogues in Coproduction is an online public seminar series dedicated to the co-production of just cities. Our ambition is to help consolidate an international community of practice interested in exploring and learning from real-life experiments addressing the growing social, spatial, environmental and political inequalities in our cities. The Dialogues in Coproduction are open to residents, activists, academics and professionals, alongside other actors from civil society organisations and local governments.
Upcoming and final session of the Dialogues in Coproduction series:
Enabling Meaningful Urban Co-production at Scale – Key Learnings, webinar, 24 septembre 2026, 15h17h CEST / 2-4pm BST
About the Fairville project
The Fairville project is an international and collaborative research project funded by Horizon Europe (EU’s funding programme for research and innovation) for the period 2023-2026. The project intends to address embedded urban inequalities and the challenge they raise to democracy in large cities and urban regions. It does so by supporting co production and bottom-up collaboration engaging citizens collectives in low-income neighbourhoods. The project uses participatory action-research and the co-production of knowledge as strategies of spatial justice to address urban inequalities affecting cities, mainly in Europe, but also in Africa. The research project is based in eight Fairville Labs, mostly linked to citizen-led initiatives run by local groups partnering in the project. The Labs are located in Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Cairo, Dakar, London and Marseille.
Cover photo: Agnès Deboulet, Brazil et Véronique Tonello, Ile de France 2022
