October 2015: A visit to Seoul to take part in the Seoul as a Model of Progressive City conference organised by a number of Korean institutions including Seoul Institute, 15-16 October. My talk was on “Progressive Cities and the Genealogy of Urban Rights”. Also gave a paper in the mini-Conference on Gentrification in the Context of East Asian Developmental Urbanization held at the Asia Center, Seoul National University, 21 October.

August 2015: Another enjoyable period of LSE-Peking University Summer School teaching on “Speculative Urbanisation in Asia”.

July 2015: Keynote: “Learning from Urban China” at the Placing Culture in Urban China workshop, University College London, 2 July 2015.

May 2015: Honoured to have given a keynote, “Speculative Urbanisation and the Politics of Displacement”, at the Alternatives to Informal Housing Conference oganised by the Seoul Institute (formerly known as Seoul Development Institute), a municipal government thinktank, and held in Seoul, 14-16 May.

May 2015: Pleasure to have taken part in the Roundtable: Geopolitical Economies of Development and Democracy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

May 2015: Honoured to be giving a keynote speech at the conference on “Los Desafíos de la Ciudad del Siglo XXI” (The Challenges of the City in the 21st Century) taking place at the Universidad Nacional Autόnoma de México, 4-8 May 2015. Full programme here: http://www.ceiich.unam.mx/ciudad/programa.pdf

March 2015: Delighted to have been back in Hong Kong and taken part in an interdisciplinary symposium at Hong Kong University on The Speculative City – Emergent Forms and Norms of the Built Environment

February 2015: My new piece on Urbanization in China is out now (click the link to view the Word version). It’s an entry in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition)

February 2015: I’ve been invited to speak at a workshop, Defining the Urban: transdisciplinary views taking place at the University of Manchester. For details, contact Dr Deljana Iossifova

January 2015: I’ve been working on a co-authored paper to explain how new-build gentrification is endogenous in Seoul, embedded in South Korea’s speculative urbanisation that undermines the society’s capacity to mobilise discontents against displacement. This is out now from the Urban Studies journal. Click on the title to view the paper: The developmental state, speculative urbanisation and the politics of displacement in gentrifying Seoul

January 2015: ‘Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement’, a co-edited volume of mine (with Loretta Lees at the University of Leicester and Ernesto Lopez-Morales at the University of Chile), is out now.