This conference hit close to home. It was a very personal affair, and not one that would be immediately obvious even to those who know me. I got to spend several days at University College London, which as it happens has played a large role in my family’s story. I’m not English, but I’ve been going to London regularly for much of my life. My sister moved there in the early 80s and she graduated from UCL. Her daughter, my niece, is currently in her first year at medical school at UCL as well. This was the first conference I’ve ever seen attended where I didn’t have to stay in an anonymous hotel or rented room. Instead I stayed with my sister, and in between sessions I walked down the hall to grab a coffee with my niece. It was surreal, and amazing.

As for the conference, it was fascinating to see London from the eyes of urban and political geography, instead of merely the place I go to visit family. The photo above was part of a slideshow of very moving billboards that cycled in the background during one of the opening lectures:

“I am desperately sorry for the generation below me who will have even less of an opportunity to live in this amazing city.”

“I’ve been priced out of my city when I’m earning above median wage.”

“If I was 10 years older I would have had a head start on the property ladder and would probably have managed to stay here.”

“I used to think people who left London were giving up. Now I’m one of them. I just can’t afford to romanticise the incredible exploitation anymore.”

All of the above, and more, can be found at londonischanging.org.

Although the theme of the conference was built around theorizing from “elsewhere” and then bringing that theory back to the so-called center of empire – a necessary political project of course, and one that I’m deeply invested in – what really moved me was seeing through professional eyes the deep structural inequalities occurring in a city that I thought I knew.

It brought home to me the fact that these really are global processes, expressed in variegated fashion depending on local political-economic and cultural contexts, but nevertheless recognizable. San Francisco, London, Zurich, Sochi, Volgograd. Witnessing this in person is a tragic privilege.