Steve Pile - Affect and City Life: Notes from London

Apr 17, 2026, 2:00 – 3:00 PM

Professor Steve Pile from Open University (UK) will be giving an exciting talk on Zoom entitled ‘Affect and City Life: notes from London’ (please see the abstract below). The talk will take place on April 17 at 2:00 pm at https://uky.zoom.us/j/4073288434

He has been invited as a speaker for a Gaines Center Cooperative composed of Michael Samers (Geography), Charlie Zhang (Gender & Women Studies), and Yujia He (Patterson School). All are welcome.

Abstract:

At 54 minutes past midnight on 14 June 2017, the emergency services received the first reports of a fire at Grenfell Tower. Starting in a faulty fridge‐freezer on the fourth floor, the fire quickly engulfed the Tower Block. The fire burned for 60 hours, despite the attendance of 70 fire engines and over 250 firefighters. The fire killed 72 people, in 23 of the tower’s flats, mostly above the twentieth floor. On 21 May 2018, the Grenfell Tower public inquiry began, after completing its procedural hearings in December 2017. It opened with a commemorative hearing, with testimony from the relatives of all the dead. Along with the memories and feelings of the relatives, the inquiry included pictures and videos. There are many stories in the fire – all are heart‐breaking. In these stories, anger and grief and hope and love and justice and truth are not yet cauterised from one another. The Grenfell Tower tragedy can be understood as an event that exposes all kinds of social structures that are normally taken-for-granted – these include racial capitalism, neoliberal housing policy, governmental malign neglect. The slow violence of actually existing capitalism horrifically demonstrated. Yet, this event also briefly allowed an affective politics to emerge and become operable. Starting with this allows us to think about affect and city life, less as a relationship between two things (ontological objects), but as a conflict between different ways of understanding affects, bodies and city life – not in theory, but as precarious, indeterminate and mutable lived experiences.

Bio: https://profiles.open.ac.uk/steve-pile

Steve Pile is Professor of Cultural Geography at Open University (UK). Dr Pile's research is primarily concerned with the relationship between place and the politics of identity. For example, Dr Pile has undertaken a series of investigations into the relationship between the city, everyday life and the spatial constitution of power. This work has found outlets in projects such as City A-Z and also a sole authored book, Real Cities: modernity, space and the phantasmagorias of city life. This book makes a case for taking seriously the more imaginary, fantasmatic and emotional aspects of urbanism. Drawing inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel and various psychogeographers, Real Cities explores the dream-like and ghost-like experiences of city life. A further strand of work has been to intervene in how Geography, as a discipline, is conceived in terms of its practices, content and approaches. Dr Pile's main contribution has been to promote the legitimacy of a psychoanalytic approach to Geography, as first set out in The Body and the City. This work has led to further research on both the body and the city. A psychoanalytic geography of the body can be found in the book Bodies, Affects, Politics. Research on the city has led to a variety of articles about London. However, the broader project has also involved a more cultural take on Geography itself found in both the Handbook of Cultural Geography and Patterned Ground.

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Steve Pile - Affect and City Life: Notes from London

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