TTiN Programme: Autumn 2025
Three events hosted by the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network in Autumn 2025. Click on the link embedded into each poster for more details and to register. Follow @TTInfraNetwork on Instagram and Bluesky or contact Dom Davies to join the TTiN mail list. Poster design by Kremena Dimitrova: https://www.kremenadimitrova.com/.
How can art and storytelling help us to make sense of infrastructures as concrete and symbolic structures, and social and imaginative systems?
Giada Peterle is a visual artist, comics author, and urban walker, and author of Comics as a Research Practice (2021) - will explore how arts-based and narrative approaches can expand the ways we think through and with infrastructures.
In this talk, she will present a series of urban experiments that use comics, autoethnography, walking, and photography as methods for telling infrastructural stories.
Filippo Menga is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Bergamo in Italy and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Political Geography. His research draws on political ecology, political geography, and development studies to advance an innovative approach to the study of water politics, particularly in relation to hydraulic infrastructure, global water networks and governance, and the dialectics of sustainability.
This panel event will launch his most recent book, Thirst: The Global Quest to Solve the Water Crisis (2025), which offers a groundbreaking account of the global water crisis and the failure of corporations and non-profits to address its worsening effects. In a whirlwind tour of global water insecurity, Thirst argues that if humanity is to escape the deadlock that bedevils access to clean water, it has to reconsider both its faith in the market and its relationship with nature.
Filippo will be in conversation with Naho Mirumachi, Professor in Environmental Politics at King's College London, and Julie Froud, Professor of Financial Innovation at the University of Manchester. The discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A.
Gentrification describes the fragmentation of working-class neighbourhoods and the displacement of their communities by wealthier residents. Programmes of regeneration and urban renewal have tended to exacerbate this process, sometimes inadvertently and often purposefully.
Through discussion with a group of experts and practitioners, this panel will ask:
What does gentrification look like now, a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century?
How can city makers renew urban spaces in ways that benefit existing residents, rather than displacing them?
And how have communities organised to resist their displacement and to preserve their urban heritage and culture?
Panellists
Charmaine Brown is Senior Lecturer in Initial Teacher Education at the University of Greenwich. Her expertise in gentrification and heritage has earned her recognition locally in Peckham and internationally, and included contributions to Black History Walks, the Wellcome Collection, Peckham Heritage Society, and BBC Radio 4's Thinking Aloud.
Anna Minton is a Reader in Architecture at the University of East London with expertise in the privatisation of public space, the financialisation of land, and gentrification and the housing crisis. She is the author of Big Capital: Who is London for? (Penguin 2017) and Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st-Century City (Penguin 2009).
Betty Owoo is an architectural designer, educator, and writer, and currently a senior design officer in the Greater London Authority's newly formed Design Unit. She works to promote quality and inclusion in the built environment through policy and development management, and has previously facilitated strategies to deliver social housing in East London.
Ash Rao is an urban designer, planner, and civil engineer committed to creating inclusive and playful public spaces. She works on the GLA’s Regeneration and Planning team, focusing on project delivery, town centre strategy, and design research on gender inclusion and safety in public space and inclusive design.
Eleesha Taylor-Barrett is a board member of the London branch of ACORN the union. ACORN is a nationwide community union, mass membership organisation, and network of low-income people organising for a fairer deal for our communities left behind by companies, councils, and parliament.
