Drawing on insights from her latest book "Global Urban Politics", Julie-Anne Boudreau puts the current response to the coronavirus in Mexico City and Montreal in a larger frame of understanding. She elaborates on the difference between urban and state logics of action and its importance to grasping the divergent situations. As a point of hope, she highlights that there is nothing inevitable about the current crisis developing into forms of authoritarian technocracies.

Guest:

Julie-Anne Boudreau held the Canada Research Chair in urbanity, insecurity, and political action from 2005-2015 at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) in Montreal. She is also Researcher at the Instituto de Geografia of the Universidad nacional autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). She founded TRYSPACES, an international research group exploring youth transgressive practices and their impact of urban governance (www.tryspaces.org). Her most recent book is entitled Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State (Polity Press, 2017). In 2021, she will publish Youth Urban Worlds: Aesthetics Political Action in Montreal (Wiley, Studies in Urban and Social Change), co-authored with Joëlle Rondeau.