This article explores how LGBT organizations in Germany create safer spaces for queer asylum seekers and refugees. With the help of interviews with experts and an analysis of their websites, different constructions of space are identified. Although the organizations use different concepts of safer spaces, they mainly fall back on essentialist notions of space. The assumption of an essentialist safer space bears the risk of oversimplification, which does not meet the needs of the target group.

The terms left behind, Abgehängte (suspended), and structurally weak have gained popularity to describe regions with increased support for right-wing populist parties in Germany and elsewhere. These concepts are not clearly defined. We give meaning to left behind places in Germany both by identifying the dimensions and varieties of left-behindness and by framing it as an outcome of peripheralisation processes. 

In this paper, I introduce urban extractivism as a decentred concept that is helpful to study urban infrastructure megaprojects (monsters) in Mexico City that extract life from bodies (the ghosts) and territories (the ruins). I also provide a special focus on collaborative research practices critical to reframing urban theory. Engaging with such a socio-territorial approach, I conclude, helps urban geographers discern future-oriented practices that embrace social and environmental justice.

This contribution offers a double-barrelled argument: that we should answer epistemological debates and better our practices by centering teaching in our scholarship for once and that we should consider the classroom a space for theory formation by students.

This interface contribution reflects on the aftermath of a concerted national media campaign that targeted the Urban Studies unit at the University of Basel in November 2023. It shows how the advancement of the media's storylines by university leadership not only undermined critical urban scholarship and socially engaged pedagogy but also paralleled attacks against other critical theories elsewhere, which are reframed as divisive concepts.

The paper outlines the need for discussing and analysing the locations from which the research questions and concerns arise. Using these arguments, the paper postulates a more inclusive future for geography. Moving away from universal theory or global research, the paper argues for plurality and pluriversal (as opposed to universal) politics.

Contemporary debates are increasingly focused on dealing with crises that span many systems and sectors. These crises have transformed the process of doing research itself, impacting research funding, the type of research being done, and the subjects of research. Through this intervention, I argue for a need to invest in developing systems and processes that build resilience within Global South institutions to be able to deal with crises as they emerge.

This essay shares a researcher's experience navigating the compounded crises of COVID-19 and the Myanmar coup during her PhD journey. The author reflects on the difficulties encountered in transitioning her fieldwork from Myanmar to Switzerland due to crises. Institutional double standards often exacerbate these challenges, especially for Global South researchers at northern institutions. Crisis experiences can serve as a critical starting point for promoting more just academic communities.

What could urban geographers continue to learn and unlearn from critical utopianism and emancipatory futurities? This contribution seeks to recover transformative academic practices and work towards didactics of speculative estrangement. Specifically, I propose to draw on science and speculative fiction literature to support the revision of established geographical imaginations and epistemologies in a higher-education context.

In this intervention we ask, “what counts as crisis?” We query the adeptness of Eurocentric epistemologies that conceptualize crises through rupture. We turn to a framing of crisis that builds on continuity, honing in on the everyday violence that women experience. Our research in Cochabamba, Delhi, Georgetown, Ibadan, Ramallah, and Shanghai shows that one in every two women participants had experienced intimate partner violence. We also ask what crises mean for the methodologies we employ.

In this forum contribution, I seek to reflect on conceptions of our current times of crises, engaging with reparatory-justice perspectives. These perspectives can add a strong sense of historical depth and a sense of entanglement between the global and the local. In alignment with Gurminder Bhambra's (2022) call for reparatory social science, I advocate for reparatory approaches in urban geography. 

This paper argues that varied perspectives on the multiple crises from the Global South and Global East are underrepresented in international urban studies publishing. In these regions, the crisis is exacerbated by the relative lack of data addressing urban issues. This absence underlines the importance of the international publishing system but justifies urgency to engage with a wider range of perspectives while also pointing towards a need to support local publishing structures.