[ui] seminar 2025-2026: The Risky City

Organized by: Michiel de Lange, Sigrid Merx, Nanna Verhoeff, Elle Zwinkels

Risky Cities – Risky Reflections – Risky Methods

Cities today are especially vulnerable to what has been called a ‘polycrisis’, where multiple risks converge and amplify each other. These include a nature crises on many fronts like climate, resource depletion, extinctions, etc., societal crises like increasing inequality, social justice, women’s/LGBTQ+ safety, housing shortage, disease outbreak, (political) riots, conflict and terror, and so on, as well as media crises in areas like accurate news information, representation and trustworthiness, and democratic debate.

Furthermore, observers and scholars alike have for a long time conceptualized urban life itself in terms of being risky in all sorts of ways. Danger, uncertainty, underground culture, criminality, life among strangers, continual sensory overload and the accompanying blasé attitude, serendipity are notions that have been used to describe this sense of dealing with risk in cities as an essential quality of urban life.

In this [urban interfaces] seminar, we wish to move beyond an understanding of ‘risk’ as an outside threat, or even accepting and embracing risk as our current ontological condition, and explore The Risky City affirmatively, as a practice – a strategy or approach – to deal with fundamental uncertainties. Risky collaborations and risk-taking in science, art and other fields can open up new perspectives of  complex urban predicaments. Speculative methods serve as risky future prefigurations. The notion of riskiness brings to the fore discussions about (in)equalities in urban futures, as the future is not equally (in)secure for everyone (marginalized, poor, climate victims, and so on).

Interfacing challenges

In this seminar series we explore The Risky City as an ‘interface challenge’ on multiple levels. While these tensions appear to be opposites, contradictory and unbridgeable, we wish to explore how to forge relations between the poles and imagine ‘interfaces’ between them.

• Between the very abstract complexity of (poly)crises and the concrete manifestations and instantiations of risk;
• Between the contested present of what is and the speculative struggle of envisioning alternative future imaginaries of what could and ought to be;
• Between the invisible, intangible nature of complex crises leading to inaction, and the potential for everyday action and agency;
• Between bridging various realms and claims to expertise like science, politics, arts, institutions, indigenous knowledge, marginalized voices, and so on;
• Between the negative appreciation of risk and more positive, exciting and enjoyable experience of risk as a fundamental urban condition;
• Between techno-centric solutionist approaches to risk mitigation, and arts (or activist)-inspired, critical and experiential “risky” approaches.

Seminar structure 

In this 2025-2026 [ui] seminar series, we address The Risky City in 3 interrelated movements,(modes of engagement) each covered by one meeting:

1. Conceptual – How can we understand risk not merely as outlier but also as fundamental to the systemic conditions of contemporary urban culture?
2. Critical – What is the role of media and technology in shaping the contemporary “risky” urban condition? In the context of increasing digitalization of urban life, how do we strike a balance between the principle of precaution and permission-less innovation?
3. Creative – How can media, art and performance play a challenging or interventionist role – as ‘risky strategies’ or ‘risky methods’ – for imagining potential alternative perspectives?

Dates:

6 May 2026 14:00 – 16:30

20 May 2026 10:00 – 12:00

3 June 2026 14:00 – 16:30 + drinks

Assignment 

3 EC via RMeS

In line with the key idea of considering risk as method, students are asked to develop a risky intervention in the city that explores the role of media, arts and/or performance in urban public space. Students will document visually, and write a blogpost about their work.

More information: urbaninterfaces@uu.nl