This panel aims at discussing how anthropology and the city may engage in a relation of inventive companionship in shared practices of urban speculation about peripheral forms of urbanism and modes of anthropological inquiry.

How can anthropology relate to the city? As a site for investigation, an object of research or, perhaps as a source of mutual apprenticeships? We aim at discussing how anthropology and the city may engage in a relation of inventive companionship in shared practices of speculation and knowledge production. There is an unmet need for knowledge about forms of city-making that take place beyond sanctioned forms and established institutions. A great variety of concepts have been recently coined to rethink contemporary ways of urbanism: from DIY urbanism to the makeshift city and composting. Located at the margins of the city and in the periphery of institutional knowledge, these subaltern interventions often speculate with other forms of collective living, In this panel, we reconsider the speculative condition of these peripheral knowledges. By that we refer to a reflexive exercise that involves future-making against the grain (Savransky, Wilkie & Rosengarten 2017), exploring alternatives modes of urbanity whose generative condition is characterised by specific ways of thinking about problems (Simone 2010). At the same time that they bring to the fore relevant questions for thinking about the city in more fruitful ways, they open up a whole series of methodological and theoretical possibilities for anthropology. We welcome papers that deal with urban speculations in the twofold dimension we refer here: ways of speculating about alternative urban forms and modes of anthropological inquiry. In so doing we are interested in revealing the productive -ontological and epistemological- condition of the periphery.

Convenors:

• Adolfo Estalella (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
• Francisco Martinez (University of Leicester)
• Francisco Martinez (University of Leicester)