Apologies for cross posting:
URBAN AFFAIRS ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE – San Francisco, April 3-6, 2013
Call for Papers
The Politics of Urban Policy Circulation:
Towards a Territorial/Relational Understanding of Urban Politics
In this panel we seek to discuss the conceptual, empirical and methodological challenges of studying the city in the twenty first century and, more particularly, to consider what it means to approach urban politics from a territorial/relational perspective. Drawing on work from across a number of disciplines, most specifically anthropology, geography, planning, political science and sociology, a group of critical urbanists have begun to theorize the world urban system relationally through the study of urban policy travels and inter-city referencing (Peck and Theodore 2010, McCann and Ward 2011, Ong and Roy 2011, Bunnell et al. 2012). For instance, McCann and Ward (2011, 2012) have sought to advance a theoretical framework to study cities by focusing on how urban policy is co-constituted by both connections to other places and local political contestations. Policy actors are broadly defined to include (but are not restricted to) activists, politicians, policy professionals, practitioners, NGOs and consultants.
This relational-territorial conceptualization of the urban raises a number of conceptual and methodological challenges for scholars interested in researching the construction of urban policy models and “best practices;” identifying the actors, agendas, institutions, and networks behind the circulating and mutating of policies; as well as in their many and variety of contestations. Moreover, the widespread travels of urban policies originating in the South such as Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting, Curitiba’s and Bogotá’s urban transportation innovations or Singapore’s green policies and urban design practices has made the current transnational traffic of policy knowledge and ideas of the “good city” much more complex than a simple North-to-South transfer.
This panel seeks to analyze the politics behind the construction of urban policy models and “best practices” and their circulations in cities of the North and the South. We encourage inter-disciplinary collaboration in this debate and welcome particularly approaches from anthropology, geography, history, planning, political science and sociology.
Authors are invited to submit a 250-400 word abstract (following the guidelines set out by the UAA (http://urbanaffairsassociation.org/conference/conference2013/participation-online-submission/session-formats/organized-panel/) to the organizers, Sergio Montero ([log in to unmask]) and Kevin Ward ([log in to unmask]) by Friday 21 September 2012.
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