Blaž will talk about marginal communities on the international seminar Offshore-Outskirt, On the Other Conviviality. The seminar will take place on Tuesday, April 25th, 2023 at the Research Center for Regional Planning and Urban Design, Seoul National University of Science and Technology.

His contribution Marginal communities: enclosures-to-be, liminalities or pure possibilities? draws on the author’s ongoing comparative study of neighbourhood communities in urban Asia. Their particular historical, socio-cultural, urban, and political contexts make generalisation across the cases and their comparison difficult. However, the study outcome shows that successful neighbourhood community building often builds on the shared experience of marginality.

The author proposes to approach marginal communities as enclosures-to-be, liminalities, and as pure possibilities to better understand the importance of neighbourhood community building for community empowerment and transformative social change. Such an approach may reveal the relevance of marginal communities, located on the urban “outskirts”, for building inclusive, resilient, and convivial “offshore” maritime communities of humans and non-humans, the major focus of this seminar.