Deen Sharp at King's College Cambridge

Terreform co-director, Deen Sharp, will be giving a talk at King’s College Cambridge on October 17, 2019.

Organized by King’s Urban Network, Deen’s talk examines the notable recent expansion of joint-stock corporations into the urban fabric of the Middle East and analyzes how the built environment was utilized to absorb surplus capital.

I look to how corporate capitalization draws on future financial revenues through the production of present urban space. In analyzing how the corporation arranges contemporary urban life through the future, I center on capitalization, the central mechanism through which the modern joint-stock corporation organizes its operations.

Capitalizing urbanization is the extension of time, the drawing of future revenues into the present through the concentration of space (urbanization). Far more than a mere financial operation, capitalizing urbanization is a force that is increasingly organizing collective life in the Middle East and beyond.

The event will be held at King’s College Audit Room.

Read Deen’s latest from Public Books, “The World the Gulf has Built” to Sustaining Peace in an Urban World and Progress in Human Geography: Difference as practice: Diffracting geography and the area studies turn.

BEYOND THE SQUARE: URBANISM AND THE ARAB UPRISINGS

Deen Sharp and Claire Panetta, Editors

Contributors: Khaled Adham; Susana Galán; Azam Khatam; C. Lanthier; Ed McAllister; Julie Mehretu; G. Ollamh; Duygu Parmaksizoglu; Aseel Sawalha; Helga Tawil-Souri

“Revolutions do not occur in a vacuum; rather, they are caused by a complex mix of domestic and international factors. They ultimately come to fruition in places, and not just in central squares.

Beyond the Square fills a major gap in our understanding of how urban space factors into popular uprisings. It is a valuable contribution to the analysis of space and politics. ”

— Asef Bayat, author of Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East

Terreform is a nonprofit 501(c)(3), urban research studio and advocacy group founded in 2005 by Michael Sorkin. Its mission is to investigate the forms, policies, technologies, and practices that will yield equitable, sustainable, and beautiful cities for our urbanizing planet.

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Deen Sharp in Progress in Human Geography

Terreform co-director, Deen Sharp, traces how the field of regional geography/area studies (focusing on Middle East studies) drifted away from the discipline of geography. He asserts that area studies’ milieus can ‘diffract’ geographical categories and create new possibilities for geographical knowledge production.

After decades of geography and area studies drifting apart, I argue there has been an area studies turn in geography. The long divergence between the two, however, has resulted in a certain misunderstanding by geographers of what area studies scholarship is and what this field can contribute to the discipline. Area studies should not be considered as an approach that merely concentrates on the representation of difference but rather as a milieu in which difference is practiced and geographical concepts can be ‘diffracted’. Area studies can offer geography new ways to think about its place in, and entanglement with, the world.

Keywords: area studies, Cold War, Middle East geography, new materialism, post-colonial theory, representation, War on Terror

PDF. Sharp, D. (2019). Difference as practice: Diffracting geography and the area studies turn. Progress in Human Geography, 43(5), 835–852. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518788954

UR (Urban Research) launches Beyond the Square

On September 26, Terreform's imprint UR (Urban Research) hosed a panel discussion at the Hagop Kevorkian Center at New York University to celebrate the launch of Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings (UR, 2016), edited by Deen Sharp and Claire Panetta. 

The panel featured both the editors, as well as Ahmed Kanna (Anthropology, University of the Pacific) and Julie Mehretu (Artist).

Watch the discussion below: