Julie’s career can be characterized as highly mobile. Born in Beijing, Julie moved to West Berlin in time to see the fall of the Berlin Wall. She later studied in the United States, at Wesleyan University in Middletown, before coming back to Germany, where she would graduate with a master’s in public policy, and eventually start a PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin. After that, her career would span various cities and institutes, including the City University of Hong Kong, the London School of Economics, and the University of Zurich, where Julie completed her habilitation (a postdoctoral promotion that does not exist in the Netherlands).

For the interview, we met at the Roeterseiland Campus of the University of Amsterdam, on a cloudy spring day. Across from our window, the grey office buildings contrasted with the old canal houses next to the university. A blue-and-white tram was just visible crossing the bridge over the water – a typical Amsterdam scene.

Julie, do you already feel at ‘home’ here at UvA? And in Amsterdam more generally?

I have been here now for a bit more than two years, and I think it has been a really fulfilling place to work. Concerning Amsterdam as a whole, I think that it will take a long time for me to really feel that this city is somehow home. My previous workplaces have all been so ‘temporary’.  I was working on a postdoc contract, a PhD position, or in other projects where I knew it was temporary. Amsterdam is very different for me because my plan is to stay. I don't know yet what that means – you will have to ask me in ten years. At this moment, I very much feel like a newcomer.

Starting with your arrival at academia: how did you roll into the urban studies focus?

Coming from an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in the social sciences, geography was never on my radar as a discipline that I would be interested in. This interest developed – thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship – when I got back to Berlin to do research on youth centres in immigrant neighbourhoods. During that project, I realized that I needed to understand how planning worked: the policy side that distributed funding and could make ultimately critical decisions about these youth centres.   
  
Afterwards, I did a master’s in public policy and wrote my thesis in partnership with the Berlin Senate for Urban Development. Having also interned there, I realized that I didn’t want to work in planning, nor for the city in the public sector. Policy is vastly interesting, but it just wasn't what I wanted to do career-wise.

But you wanted to pursue an academic career instead, dive more into theory?

Well, actually quite the opposite. I exited the university because I thought that I did not want to deal with theory. I worked in the private sector for about three years because I thought I wanted to do something more applied, more useful… In the end, that made me keen to go back to the university.

To deal with theory again?

To do something where I felt I could learn something, generate knowledge and have ownership over it. When you write reports in the private sector you don't have any ownership over the thing. There is stuff that I wrote that I would never put my name on. Client-based service work is fine for what it is, but I found it really irresponsible in many ways. Academia offers more intellectual accountability. I also wanted to work on a project that was longer term.

You went on to do a PhD at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which focused on art spaces in Berlin and Beijing. Would this become one of the first themes that characterised you as a scholar?

I did many more projects before, but my PhD might have been the first project that I felt I had initiated myself.

Over the last years, you also wrote many reflections on more ‘meta’ topics, such as the project of creating a more global urban studies through postcolonial methods. Would you agree with such an interpretation of your work?

I don't think about it as a project so much as my approach. It is something that I use in terms of how I approach my empirical research. I don't do research on comparison – I compare in my research. I think about it more as a heuristic, a way I see things.

But you did write quite a few reflections on the approach, right? Maybe more than other scholars.

I did indeed write a lot of reflective essays. It has a lot more to do with the fact that I didn't have the resources to do empirical research. Because I only had short contracts without research funds attached to them, I could not go on longer fieldwork. Therefore, I found myself writing more theoretical, methodological and process-oriented kinds of papers, and I was often invited to write on these topics. So yeah, it happens to be a lot of my output so far, but I’m hopeful that it will change moving forward.

So, that is more the result of practical limitations, rather than an epistemological project?

I do have an interest in seeing the urban studies field become less parochial. But rather than setting agendas or writing a manifesto, I want to do research this way myself. Now I have a five-year grant project from the Swiss National Science Foundation, I can actually do research in the way that I think could contribute something.

Now that you have the resources, what phenomena do you want to research?

We study aspirational urbanism in everyday city life in Hong Kong and Taipei. I get to do this project with a team, which is exciting. This way, I can incorporate the expertise of people from Hong Kong, as well as perspectives from different disciplines. I tried to assemble a team to figure out ways of analysing urban change and urban life at the micro scale.

This is exciting to me: to look at the small scales of space and agency, for example, through methods like walking in the city. This is not a new approach, people have been using walking as a research method for a long time. But how we apply a method of walking in these cities, for instance, to analyse it from a point of view of ‘affect’, can be a bit innovative. And what does it mean then when we frame walking in public space in the context of increasing censorship and surveillance in Hong Kong? This may sound less ambitious in the grand theoretical sense of creating ‘a more global urban studies’. But to actually concretize that in something very small, can be very powerful.

Is this team also located in multiple places?

The team is based in Basel because the funding is based there, and we do research in Hong Kong and Taipei – together as well as separately. They are also affiliated with the UvA, we have already presented a first paper here at the UvA’s Urban Geographies research group.

Zooming back to Amsterdam as a place to work, we would like to start with discussing the metaphor ‘Amsterdam as a lab’. What comes to mind when you hear that phrase?

Most of my colleagues' research comes to mind. This department is really prolific in terms of its research about this city and cities in the Netherlands more generally. The institution is really known for this.

Another way to think about the metaphor is to consider the kind of knowledge that can be produced here – not only research about Amsterdam. That makes me think about other labs. We just had a discussion today about the Chicago School of Urban Sociology. They used Chicago very much as a lab – not only to study Chicago. The University of Chicago, and the Department of Sociology specifically, formed an institutional kind of lab from which research about a lot of places, groups and topics was generated.

But I almost wonder if the UvA isn't so big that it makes it impossible to be coherent anymore. I don’t see an ‘Amsterdam School of Urban Thought’ in the epistemological sense. And I think that is for good, actually. I don't know if we need that kind of canon-building from here. There is a richness to intellectual disagreement in the department. That makes it an exciting place to work.

You don't really engage with Amsterdam in your research. Are you an odd one out here at the department?

I don't think so. People here work on places way beyond Amsterdam – that is especially clear from the PhDs and master students. Amsterdam is a good institutional home for a lot of reasons, but it shouldn't – and doesn't – limit the geographies of interest.

For us, the topic of ‘Amsterdam as a lab’ is also about reflecting on the local context and practice of knowledge production. You already mentioned that you experience the department here as a diverse institution, topic- and approach-wise. Could you further reflect on how this institution affects your work?

Well, that affects it greatly. If we think more broadly about the effect of institutional homes, maybe especially right now, is that they provide a space of stability from which you can do research and take risks. I think that we increasingly see how the degree to which researchers can take risks is being clamped down on at other universities and various academic settings. And I don’t say we are totally free from this here. But institutions matter for the degree to which they can provide researchers with enough stability to engage in research, to learn, and to fail as well. If we are constantly just validating our own theories, we don’t learn that much.

In that sense, it has been a mixed two years for me. In a lot of ways, the institution here is fantastic. There are so many colleagues whose work I admire, and it is great to be part of such a group.

But the last two years have been marked by a lot of uncertainty for the institution. There is a constant looming pressure of budget cuts and de-internationalization. As a newcomer to the institution, you get to wonder: this institution that I thought was going to provide me the stability to take these great leaps in my research, can I still do that in five years, in two years, next year?

In a recent commentary on Palat Narayanan’s article about Ontological Locationality, you write that “now I strangely find myself in the most privileged position of all with the job security and resources to think from the periphery. A new ontological space that comes again with an ability to take risks I didn't see were available to me before” – does this also refer to the relative stability you experience at the UvA?

Exactly. It also reflects what we discussed before: much of what I have managed to publish so far is about theory, the canon, and how we do research about things that we already know. Not having the pressure anymore to generate a specific amount of output, allows me to maybe think beyond what we already know.

You also mentioned that it allows you to ‘think from the periphery’. Can you explain that?

I don’t think about this too literally in terms of geography. There has been already so much research published about Hong Kong – it is definitely not an epistemological periphery. It refers to the periphery in a more metaphorical sense, maybe in the sense that AbdouMaliq Simone has written about ‘the surrounds’ as the kind of space from which to write. That might be a conceptual periphery. That might also include engaging with concepts, theories and scholars that aren't the most cited and recognized. So, the periphery is not just a geographical place, but also a way to understand those places, or place in general.

In the quote discussed above, you characterize your position as ‘privileged’. In an earlier reflection, you have also described yourself as an ‘outsider within northern academia’. How do you reconcile these two positions?

I don't, they exist simultaneously. For the preface to my book [Engaging Comparative Urbanism: Art Spaces in Beijing and Berlin] in 2020, I was asked to reframe the text in light of Covid. What I wrote was a discussion of my positionality, but I also wanted to be more specific in the framing. I wanted to reflect on what I am able to do because of who I am and how I am perceived.
For instance, as an ethnically Chinese person in a German academic context, a lot of assumptions have been made about me just through my existence in that room. I found it so funny that no one thought to ask me whether I spoke Chinese – because what other language presumably would I speak? Thus, I think about my position in relation to both privilege – I do have the power to occupy the space, I have the passports to travel to my sites of research. And to marginality – I'm sometimes the only person that looks like this in the room, or at the whole institution, which sets different expectations of me. That happens at the same time, I don't divide one part of myself from the other.

You have reflected before on the promises and challenges of comparative methods: they bring a lot of new questions related to positionality, to who is able to and who should compare, to who has to bear the burden of comparison. Given your new position and the project in Hong Kong and Taipei, where you have a research team on the ground, while linked to an institution in Amsterdam, how do you reflect on these questions now?

Yeah, this topic unpacks a lot of questions. To start with: comparison in and of itself is not a solution for everything. It is not going to cure the world's ills, and it is also not inherently critical, right? A lot of comparative work out there is very traditional in terms of its approach to research and what counts as scientific. For me, comparison means trying to think about places in relation. This relational comparison has been a struggle and an inspiration over and over again.

An important struggle is the justification of site selection. How do I explain to funders why I compare Hong Kong and Taipei? Because they are not similar cases, while also not ‘most different’ in that sense. And I don't seek to draw out all the variables of similarity and difference, that is not the point.

There are more flights between Hong Kong and Taipei than any other two cross-border destinations in the world; there exists a relationship that is worth exploring. Does one place represent the future of another place? When people look at them symbolically, what do they represent? Right now, I think about comparison anew with these specific places, new methods and at the micro scale which I mentioned before.

The question about comparison from here, from this institution in Amsterdam, is also worth reflection on. In the same way that comparison doesn’t solve all the world's ills, diversification does not either. Just because we include an institution from elsewhere doesn't necessarily make the study global. You can find very Eurocentric viewpoints in the Global South, just like we have anti-colonial theory coming out of the heart of the empire. So place does not necessarily determine what kind of knowledge is produced there.

That being said, place does matter. It matters because of institutions, resources and power. I will give a really concrete example from my current research. Last year, I found myself at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) here in Amsterdam, because they have an archival collection from Hong Kong. I worked with one of their archivists on a project about placemaking at a distance.

Now: why is that collection here in Amsterdam? It's here because there is an institution, the IISH, with the resources to host the collection, and because it is a safe place for the collection to be. They are ‘safeguarding’ it, because those materials are not safe in Hong Kong. Place matters and resources matter. And that is unfair; some people maybe think that those materials should not be here – as they are not necessarily available anymore to the people who were part of its history. I'm not saying it is right, but I'm just saying that it is the situation.

And this also applies to your research?

Yes, the kind of research I’m able to do from here or Basel, is different than at some other universities in the world.

In your writings on a more global urban studies, you mention the importance of more simple or practical measures like learning new languages. So of course, we are wondering… [laughter] how is your Dutch?

[Smiling] Yeah, my Dutch is not that good. It is really humbling to learn a new language after you are forty. But I'm working on it. Dutch is really interesting because it is so similar to German, which I do speak. I find it hard to keep them apart. It drives me crazy – probably because they are both second languages – that I’m losing my German without improving my Dutch.

Learning the language is important to you, also while you are currently working at an Anglo-dominated department?

Well, there is a lot of moralizing right now around Dutch language acquisition which I don't need, and I don't think our non-Dutch-speaking colleagues need. Not speaking Dutch is seen as some kind of deficit. People have been hired here because they are brilliant researchers, and to somehow think of them as having a deficit because they don't speak Dutch… I feel this somehow misses the mark.

I do think that it is important to learn the language of wherever I live, because of living there. And Dutch is a kind of funny language, if I can say that. There is humour to it, and you understand a place through language in a different way. So, it’s important to me to work on my Dutch.

Now that you are living here, would you like to do research on Amsterdam as well, in the future?

I feel a bit intimidated by it because there are so many researchers in our department for whom it is their life's work. So I don't know what I have to contribute necessarily, although I do tend to engage with the place where I work over time. For example, in Zurich, I found myself ultimately doing a project with undocumented workers for a qualitative methods course. It wasn't planned but projects sometimes come up. And I don't want to ignore interesting things that might come up.

And I’m already doing a project with the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, as I just explained. This year, we got a small grant from the Centre for Urban Studies to collaborate with the IISH on a project about objects and exile. Together with two archivists, we explored exile through the materiality of objects and developed an exhibit and a workshop on this theme. So that is actually the first research I have done in Amsterdam, although it is not, let's say, about Amsterdam.

We want to conclude by asking for your reflection on the book Understanding Amsterdam [Essays on economic vitality, city life & urban form, edited by Léon Deben, Willem Heinemeijer, and Dick van der Vaart published in 1993, then reedited and expanded in 2000, by Het Spinhuis], which is an inspiration to the interview series.

The different essays from visiting scholars [such as Susan Fainstein, Edward Soja, Manuel Castells, among others] portrayed Amsterdam as a truly global city. A city embedded in global cultural and economic flows, but also a relevant case study and urban model for topics such as tolerance or justice. We were wondering, can such a book be interpreted as an example of those urban imaginaries and worlding processes you write a lot about?

Without knowing this book specifically, academic work has such a function. The relevant question for me is not ‘do academics have that role?’ - because yes, they have. But rather: ‘should they be the only ones?’ Whose visions are able to dictate the future, is very much an issue of power. My work on aspiration is a lot about the question of ‘who needs to imagine alternative futures?’, because the ones today are unbearable. The question of envisioning is complicated: it is about the vision, about who is able to articulate their vision, but also about who needs to envision otherwise.

This makes us wonder how significant the actual role of academia is, in creating those imaginaries. Some people say that academics are mostly talking in their own echo chambers… Maybe, these societal future imaginaries are created by other people, movements, companies in everyday lives, without ‘our’ academics’ influence?

Yes, I guess this is a more general question about the relevance of academia. I don't know if I'm the best person to comment on that… But I think that urban studies as a field is currently very critical of inequality, exclusion, violent epistemologies. It might be much more difficult to do the constructive thing right now. That is a weakness in academic work, I suppose.

And to come back to your theme of ‘Amsterdam as a lab’: experimentation is also part of research and lab work. There could be more space to do the imaginative work, the kind of creative thinking that could also fail. Imagination requires you to be more vulnerable: saying what you want versus only critiquing what is bad. I think that is way harder to do.