In 2024/25 TCG NCAT will concentrate on ‘Urban Futures: Entrepreneurial states, private capital and new forms of citizenship in the making of cities’. Our research focuses on new contexts of urbanism that involve fundamental shifts in the ways cities are designed, governed and lived in. Contemporary urban life reflects transformations in relationships between the state, markets and citizens. We explore how urban life is influenced by changes across these different registers and levels. As states are exhorted to become more ‘entrepreneurial’ and private capital undertakes ‘state-like’ activities, citizens negotiate varying relationships with the two, both resisting and conforming to new conditions of urban life. This flux, in turn, is the crucible in which new imaginations of the state, the market and personal and social identities are being formed. TCG NCAT is especially interested in exploring i) Urbanism and new forms of exclusion and inclusion; ii) Privatisation, social life and city-making; iii) The rural-urban interface; iv) Democracy and the ‘digital’ turn in urbanism.
