TCG NCAT invites applicants working on ‘Urban Futures: Entrepreneurial states, private capital and new forms of citizenship in the making of cities’. We seek fellows whose research interests focus on new contexts of urbanism that involve fundamental shifts in the ways cities in the Global South are designed, governed and lived in. Contemporary urban life reflects transformations in relationships between the state, markets and citizens and the fellowship particularly seeks to facilitate explorations of 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. We invite expressions of interest from scholars across the social sciences whose interests lie in exploring what happens in the ‘middle’ of the city as well as at its borders that are in the process of becoming urbanised. TCG NCAT looks for applicants whose interests lie in at least 2-3 of the following areas of research: i) Spatial imaginings: work, leisure, commerce; ii) New urbanism and social identities: religion, family life, neighbourhoods; iii) Planning, city-making, the state and different forms of capital, iv) The rural-urban frontier, v) The social and cultural contexts of new land markets. vi) Securitisation: urban surveillance mechanisms and the social life of cities; vii) The ‘digital turn’ in the making of cities: state, private capital, citizens, policies; viii) Changing temporal regimes of the city.
