Urban

The Urban Research Hub brings together faculty, students, and community partners in individual and collaborative research projects on cities and urban life, as well as critical discourses on development, mobility, and capitalism. We are interested in sociological, anthropological, historical and other approaches to defining and understanding cities, their limits and borders, as well as their relationships to and implications for the peri-urban and rural. Ongoing projects include analyses of neighborhood stratification through metrics of mobility and vitality; the use of GIS mapping tools to understand issues of race and class over time; vernacular cosmopolitanisms in world cities, gentrification in Washington D.C. and National Landing in northern Virginia, and geographies of urban protest in the U.S. and abroad.

Past Events: Recaps and Inquiries

Disrupting DC: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City

Monday, September 11, 2023, co-author Dr. Katie Wells presented her book Disrupting DC: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City. With her co-authors Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen, they tell the story of Uber as a political force, revealing how DC became a testing ground and eventual “playbook” for the company's consolidation of power across the nation and the globe. Dr. Wells is a postdoctoral Fritz Fellow with Georgetown University’s new Tech & Society initiative and based in the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program. She is also an affiliated fellow with the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation and the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative. 

Find out how it went! 

Event Highlights:

CSSR Urban Research Hub Workshop:

Corporate Community Development: National Landing and Beyond Workshop

CSSR Urban Research Hub Workshop:

Corporate Community Development: National Landing and Beyond Workshop Call for Papers

Spatial Justice as a Product of Field Relationships: Post-Communist Governance and Ideological Dominance (the case of Prague)

A Dissertation Workshop with Václav Orcígr

Friday, February 24, 2023 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EST

What are the possible benefits of theory of practice for exploring spatial inequalities in current cities? Prague, as a post-communist city, creates an interestingly colorful and broad field of actors involved in urban governance, planning, decision-making, and public participation. Within the context of critical discourse analysis applied to media articles and public meetings, the workshop will focus on the patterns of ideological dominance.

The workshop format will include a short presentation and joint discussion focusing on the writing process, sharing experiences, and evaluating the research. The workshop will also focus on the role of reconsidering the concepts of field and capital and their use within planning practices and urban governance.

Václav Orcígr is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Charles University in Prague, Czechia. He is currently residing in Washington, D.C., as part of his Fulbright program stay at George Mason University. His research focuses on the neoliberal development of cities in the post-socialist context, housing affordability and alternatives, ideological performativity within constructed discourses on urbanism and the conception of the right to the city.

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