Originally posted on Places Journal.
We’re pleased to announce that Shoshana R. Goldstein has been selected as the recipient of the inaugural Princeton | Places Urban Imagination Prize. Her project, “The Urban Exodus: Mobility Justice for India’s Migrants in the Age of Covid-19,” will tell the story of the longstanding inequities suffered by migrant workers in Gurugram, and how these have been intensified in the face of the global pandemic.
The jury also awarded honorable mentions to proposals by Aimi Hamraie, on “Infrastructural Preferences: The Disability Politics of Active Transportation”; and by Thandi Loewenson, on “Black Flight,” as embodied in Zambian Space Program.
Goldstein is currently a Princeton Mellon / Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies Fellow in the Department of Architecture and M.S. Chadha Center for Global India, where her research focuses on urban planning in South Asia. She holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from Cornell University and an M.A. in international affairs from The New School.
The jury was especially impressed with the narrative depth and detail of Goldstein’s proposal, which connects an important story of longstanding mobility injustice grounded in Gurugram, India, with pressing global issues, including a spurious “politics of self-reliance” and the value of more communal and compassionate responses. Marshall Brown, director of the Princeton Urban Imagination Center, noted that “as a center dedicated to the production of exceptional urbanism, we are pleased to support the creation of new public scholarship with this prize, and were delighted to receive a wide-ranging group of submissions from around the world. The selected project stood out to the jury for its conceptual strength and, of course, timeliness. We look forward to seeing the results of Dr. Goldstein’s research and writing in the coming months.”
The Princeton | Places Urban Imagination Prize was established this year to encourage ambitious public scholarship in the design disciplines. Recipients receive an honorarium of $7,500 to produce a major work of public scholarship for Places and present a related lecture sponsored by the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. This year’s prize jury consisted of Marshall Brown; Aleksandar Hemon, professor of creative writing at Princeton; Chika Okeke-Agulu, professor of art and archaeology at Princeton; Frances Richard, senior editor at Places; Deborah Lilley, managing editor at Places; and Nancy Levinson, editor and executive director at Places. Aleksandar Hemon and Chika Okeke-Agulu are members of the Executive Committee of the Urban Imagination Center.
