IAS Junior Core Fellow Petr Vašát awarded Marie Curie Global Fellowship

IAS CEU is delighted to share that Petr Vašát, IAS Junior Core Fellow of 2020/21, was awarded a prestigious Marie Curie Global Fellowship at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with a project titled Surface for Urban Innovation: The Politics of Designing Poverty in Colombia and Czechia (SURBANIN).

The SURBANIN project explores the global operation of social innovations that tackle urban poverty through architecture, art or design (AAD). These innovations have played an increasingly important role alongside more established global and national social policies. However, regardless of their positive or negative impacts, they are very often locally decontextualised and isolated from the urban and cultural politics that make poverty. As a result, such innovations may not eliminate poverty, but rather redesign it. The project will focus on a number of heterogeneous social innovations - from cable cars and macro-murals in cities of Colombia to small-scale architectonic improvements and design innovations in homeless encampments in cities of Czechia - to establish a novel understanding of how innovations globally emerge and travel, how they are locally implemented and with what impact. Rather than fully embracing or rejecting AAD innovations, the project inquires why they are adopted and whether the context of adoption determines their outcomes.