On July 5-6, 2025, we hosted participants from around the world for the ‘Imagining the Anti-Fascist City: Contested Geographies of Resistance and Solidarity Conference!’. Scholars, researchers, community organisers and artists converged in Helsinki to discuss and imagine what an anti-fascist city might look like. A rich tapestry of imaginaries and realisations were presented from a variety of historical, aesthetic and disciplinary lenses, painting the urban space as a contested geography with enormous potentiality for not just combating fascism but also for constructing anti-fascist futures.
The conference was opened by Kasper Braskén, co-organiser and Academy Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, who encouraged the need for an expansive, brave and interdisciplinary approach to imagining the anti-fascist city. Braskén, encouraged participants to push the boundaries of conventional thinking on anti-fascism and highlighted the timely importance for such thinking.
The keynote, which was part of the URBARIA Lecture Series, was delivered by Professor David Featherstone of the University of Glasgow. With a specific focus on Chilean anti-fascist port workers, Featherstone spoke on the important role port cities, like Helsinki, have played in fighting fascism and for the transmission of anti-fascist politics. Featherstone was then joined by Professor Peter Cole, University Western Illinois University, and Minna Henriksson, a visual artist based in Helsinki, for a roundtable discussion on anti-fascist struggles and iconography in port cities.
The conference comprised of five panels with participants from across the globe. They covered a variety of themes and perspectives with examples and visions of the anti-fascist city drawn from across Asia, Europe, Africa and North and South America. That included reflections from metropoles such as Bari, Barcelona, Calcutta, Cape Town, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Mexico City, New York City, San Francisco, Seoul and Vancouver and more. Panelists provided an assortment of examples of neighborhoods, districts and citywide anti-fascist geographies and activities. This included discussions on urban anti-fascist subjectivities and urban anti-fascist behaviours; highlighting and reflecting on the importance of anti-fascist iconography in urban spaces and collective memorisations of anti-fascist pasts and futures; and examples of the reterritorialisation of urban spaces and cities as hubs of global anti-fascist solidarities.
The conference closed on a high and in a spirit and with a desire for continuing conversations and collaborations. The immediate intention is to publish an open access edited volume comprised of articles from the conference. But the wider and ongoing intention is to continue the conversation on the anti-fascist city, include more voices and spaces into the conversation and spark more imaginaries towards inclusive and free anti-fascist spaces.
Everyone on the organising committee would like to thank all of the participants and to those that will follow and participant in future projects and trajectories that arise from this conference.
By ITAFC Organising Committee
Leave a Reply