Stuart Hall and the City: Exposing Racial Injustice through Creative Contestation
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Stuart Hall. Photograph by Eamonn McCabe / The New Yorker |
Stuart Hall and the City: Exposing Racial Injustice through Creative Contestation, co-organised by Mahsa Alami Fariman and Ahmadreza Hakiminejad, and sponsored by the Political Geography Research Group, is part of the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference, hosted by the University of Birmingham from 26-29 August 2025. The session will take place on 28 August in the Arts Building (LR3) at 16:50. Speakers include Sonali Dhanpal (Buell Research & Teaching Fellow, Columbia University), John Clarke (Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, Open University), and Nick Beech (The Stuart Hall Archive Project, University of Birmingham).
Stuart Hall and the City: Exposing Racial Injustice through Creative Contestation
Convenors:
Mahsa Alami Fariman
Ahmadreza Hakiminejad
Date: 28 August 2025
Time: 16:50 - 18:30 BST
Location: University of Birmingham | Arts Building (LR3)
SYNOPSIS
The aim of this panel is to bring together a diverse group of academics to examine Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order in relation to the history of racial inequality in urban planning and policy in UK cities—both in the 1970s and 80s and in the present day. Our goal is to advance theoretical debates on racism in urban planning within postwar Britain’s so-called “race relations capitals” and “inner cities” (Connell, 2019) while employing creative methodologies to uncover the role of urban planning apparatuses at the local level during this period. Specifically, we explore how "mugging" became what Stuart Hall describes as a ‘conjunctural crisis’—a moment in which newspapers, the justice system, the police, and broader political and cultural ideologies converged to criminalise Black and Brown communities in the inner cities. To map the racial injustices of this urban moment, this panel engages with ‘Policing the Crisis’ alongside archival materials to address the following questions:
- How did postwar urban planning systems and policies shape the spatial configuration of ‘coloured’ settlements and ‘inner cities’ in cities such as Birmingham and beyond?
- In what ways did the emergence of the ‘inner city’ contribute to structured and hegemonic policing practices targeting Black and Brown communities in UK cities?
- Why does the postwar territorialisation of the ‘inner city’ as a pathological space (Rhodes & Brown, 2019; Alexander, 2009; Dahya, 1974) remain relevant today, and how can anti-racist activism advance a counterhegemonic agenda within the UK cities?
In this panel, we aim to read, decipher, and map ‘Policing the Crisis’ in relation to urban planning and policy, recognising the racism embedded in the UK's urban planning systems as part of the broader process of criminalising Black and Brown communities in the 1970s and 80s (Hall et al., 1978). By engaging with Stuart Hall’s theories and concepts as tools for challenging established knowledge in urban design, planning, and policy (Beebeejaun, 2022), we seek to foster an investigative and culturally situated production of knowledge. This approach counters the racist urban orders embedded in colonial and capitalist structures, which continue to exclude non-white bodies from the official narratives of urban environments (Miraftab, 2009).