Agenda

Guest lecturer
Prof. Marie Gibert, University of Paris

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Abstract 
In most of the Western academic literature, public spaces conjure up images of large, open areas with a strong positive a priori related to the democratic process and open debates, supposedly associated - historically - with the Ancient Greek agora. But this dominant framework fails to capture the diversity of practises that are constitutive of ordinary public spaces in cities in Asia. Proposing more open-ended, processual, and performative conceptions of ‘publicness', Prof. Gibert shows how public space research benefits theoretically from the 'Southern Turn'. This lecture's objectives are theoretical and methodological: first, to unpack the notion of public space in order to make it relevant beyond its historical location; and second, to show how spatial ethnography at a micro urban level can help to overcome habitual representations of ‘publicness’ and open up a promising, comparative research agenda.
Prof. Gibert will test and apply this conceptual and methodological framework to ordinary streets and alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City, where she conducted extensive fieldwork over the past 12 years, resulting in the recent publication of two books. She transformed rich, variegated local data into an array of experimental maps, visuals and timelines that show how intended and unintended effects, locally and globally-driven processes, interact and produce original public places where local users benefit from unequal conditions of negotiations. This research perspective unveils in particular new insights about the importance and the political potential of ordinary public spaces. 

Bio
Marie Gibert-Flutre is Associate Professor of Geography in the Department of East Asia Studies (LCAO) at the University of Paris. Her research deals with the dynamics of public and private spaces in the production and appropriation of urban space in Asia. By critically exploring ‘global Asia’ from ordinary public spaces and neighborhoods, she turns in particular the traditional approach to ‘global cities’ upside down and contributes to a renewed conception of metropolization as a highly situated process, where forces at play locally are both intertwined and labile. As Principal Investigator, she manages the Ho Chi Minh City case study of the International SEANNET (Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network) research programme (IIAS, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation). She has recently published Les envers de la métropolisation: Les ruelles de Ho Chi Minh Ville (Vietnam) (CNRS Edition, 2019) and Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), co-edited with Heide Imai. 

This conference is part of Geopolitics of Southeast Asia Seminar Series
Course of Geopolitics of Southeast Asia, Prof. Giuseppe Bolotta
(B.A. program in “Languages, Cultures, and Societies of Asia and Mediterranean Africa”, South-East Asia Curriculum)