A Place in the City: Screening and Discussion
The Urban Sustainability Living Lab (USLL) warmly invites you to a screening and discussion of Gabriel Silvestre’s film A Place in the City. The documentary explores resistance and hope in South American cities and serves as a call to rethink urban development.
- Aquí puedes encontrar la información sobre el evento en español
A Brownbag Lunch will also take place the following day, providing an opportunity for further exchange and discussion with Gabriel Silvestre.
Filmscreening and Discussion
Film: ES/EN/PT, German subtitles
Discussion: DE/ES, with simultaneous interpretation
This event will be held in Spanish and German.
When? Wednesday, April 15th 2026, 7-9 pm
Where? SOHO STUDIOS
Main Entrance
Liebknechtgasse 32
1160 Wien
Directions are available here.
Please register here in advance.
The event is supported by the University of Vienna´s Environment and Climate Hub (ECH).
Brownbag Lunch
This event will be held in English.
When? Thursday, April 16th 2026, 1-2 pm
Where? Department of Geography and Regional Research
University of Vienna
Conference Room, 5th floor
Universitätsstraße 7
1010 Wien
You can find a floor plan here.
No registration required.
Screening and Discussion
About the documentary
“A Place in the City by Dr Gabriel Silvestre from Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, features communities in Latin America facing displacement, segregation, and gender inequality. The film captures how ordinary people are reshaping their neighbourhoods—fighting not just for rights, but for the power to design more inclusive urban futures. Through powerful stories from Santiago de Chile, Rosario (Argentina), and Belo Horizonte (Brazil), the film weaves together compelling commentary with archival and original footage. It is both a tribute to collective action and a call to imagine cities differently.” More…
“A Place in the City highlights how new social movements are reclaiming the right to the city- mobilising communities, shaping solutions, and taking the lead in managing their own neighbourhoods”
– Gabriel Silvestre
The Trailer of A Place in the City is available here.
Programme
The event takes place at SOHO Studios in Vienna’s 16th district.
7 pm Screening: A Place in the City
8 pm Panel discussion and Q&A with the filmmaker
The event will be conducted in Spanish and German. The film will be screened in original Spanish/Portuguese/English with German subtitles. The discussion afterwards will be simultaneously interpreted. If you wish to use the interpretation service, please bring your smartphone and headphones. Find more information here.
Discussants
Gabriel Silvestre is a senior lecturer and program director of the Master’s program in Urban Planning at Newcastle University. His research is situated at the intersection of urban governance, policy-making, and social justice, with a particular focus on the role of knowledge and ideas in shaping policy processes. Hereby, he adopts a relational and comparative approach that is attentive to the (postcolonial) development trajectories of cities in the Global South and the contemporary dynamics of localising global urban models.
Ulrich Brand is Professor of International Politics at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, where has been teaching and conducting research since 2007. He is Head of the Research Group Latin America, and his research focuses on critical analyses of globalisation, civil society and social movements, as well as global environmental governance and socio-ecological transformations with an emphasis on resource, energy, and climate policy.
Gabriela Jorquera Mercado was born in Mödling as the daughter of Chilean refugees from Valparaiso. She grew up and currently lives in Vienna. Gabriela is a mother, teacher and activist, and part of Chile despertó Viena, Feministisches* Bloco Descolonial, and Viena Chilena.
Brownbag Lunch
Popular urbanism: Learning from co-production, insurgency and prefiguration in Latin American neighbourhoods
Urban and peri-urban land in Latin America have become a key arena of conflict, where market pressures and longstanding inequalities expose working-class neighbourhoods to displacement and tenure insecurity. In this brownbag lunch, Dr Gabriel Silvestre (Newcastle University) will present different community-led responses in Rosario (Argentina), Santiago (Chile) and Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and what we can learn from popular urbanism and the shifting ways movements plan with the state, against the state and despite the state. A comparative analysis identified three interrelated strategy sets: territorial strategies that defend place and prefigure alternative relations; institutional strategies that inhabit, contest or redesign policy instruments and participatory spaces; and multiscalar articulations that connect neighbourhood struggles to wider circuits of resources and learning. Across the cases, these overlapping strategies helped secure permanence, influence housing and infrastructure outcomes and advance broader political projects. Following Dr Gabriel Silvestre´s input presentation, we invite participants to discuss their different disciplinary and geographic perspectives on popular urbanism and co-production and how they might strengthen the recognition and analysis of community-led urban development.
The event cordially invites interested colleagues from the University of Vienna and will be held in English. Bring your own lunch.
