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*Urban Conditions and Life Chances*
International Conference, Amsterdam 6th July – 8th July 2006, Universiteit
van Amsterdam, AMIDSt, Research and Training Network UrbEurope

CALL FOR PAPERS

We aim to bring together coherent selections of papers to stimulate fruitful
discussion and to approach journals with a proposal for a special issue on
each workshop. We invite participants to submit an abstract before March 1st
2006, and a full paper before June 1st 2006. Discussants of the papers will
be appointed. Abstracts will be selected based on their themes and how well
they fit with other papers. All contributors are invited to submit an
abstract.

Workshops

Social interactions and dynamics in the urban region
Karin Pfeffer, Joram Grünfeld, Evert Verkuijlen

The core elements of the workshop “Social interactions and dynamics in the
urban region” are people, space, time and spatial scale. In this workshop we
would like to address topics like human behaviour in space and time, human
activities and spatial scale, location-place-space relations, spatial
interactions, urban and regional dynamics of spatial patterns, monitoring of
spatial dynamics, information requirement of urban or regional policy
formulation and evaluation. Furthermore we would like to see current GIS
applications and developments in those fields.


Life courses and time-space behaviour
Clara Mulder, Marjolijn van der Klis and Francesca Michielin

To date, research using the life-course approach and research on time-space
behaviour have mostly been carried out apart from each other. In this
workshop we focus on the time-space behaviour of individuals in the context
of their life courses and possibly those of other members of their
households. We welcome papers on migration, residential mobility, commuting
and daily life paths. We are interested in papers using quantitative
methods, qualitative methods, or combinations of both.


Urban Conditions for Creative Knowledge
Marco Bontje and Sako Musterd

Creative and knowledge-intensive industries and services have recently
become the most wanted economic activities for many cities. What spatial,
social and cultural conditions should cities offer to be attractive for
creative and knowledge-intensive companies and their workers? And what are
the possible desirable and less desirable effects of promoting a creative
knowledge economy on cities and their citizens?


Area-based urban programmes and new local governance
Thea Dukes and Ugo Rossi

In the last decade, many European countries have initiated area-based urban
programmes, in response to major social and economic problems in the cities
(e.g. URBAN). Aside from targeting a well marked deprived urban area, these
urban policies pursued an integrated way of working. The workshop will focus
on the impact of these programmes on the modes of local governance in their
target areas. Could one argue that they have truly stimulated ‘new’ modes of
local governance? And, if so, how sustainable have these ‘new modes’ proved
to be over time?
As the outcomes of these programmes might be strongly conditioned by
national political-administrative structures and by the presence (or lack)
of a national policy framework, the issue will be approached from a
comparative perspective, in which European and/or national programmes in
cities in different EU member states will be the focus of examination.


The Urban Context and Exclusion
Manuel Aalbers and Sako Musterd

In the international social science literature on urban change much
attention has been given to the mutuality of the relation between man and
his/her environment. Until a few decades ago the research focus was,
however, mainly on what people’s impact is on urban space, resulting in
descriptions of changing urban structures and writings about understanding
these changes. Yet, over the past decades the other side of the coin also
increasingly received attention. Here the question to be answered is: how
does the existing urban structure condition people’s life and life chances?
In urban studies this question has often briefly been referred to as “does
neighbourhood matter?” Crucial questions in society were addressed, such as:
“does it make a difference for an individual to grow up in a good or in a
bad environment?” Are specific neighbourhoods helping people to integrate
and to reach a better position in life; and do other neighbourhoods prevent
people from smooth integration and do these actually create conditions for
exclusion of individuals? Who and what are behind these mechanisms?
Clearly, neighbourhood effect debates are related to issues of social
inequality and social polarisation and the supposedly existing relation
between segregation and integration also has become part of the debate. This
includes questions about spatial dispersal policies or policies aimed at
social mixing, but also practices of redlining and racial and social
exclusion. It is important to analyze if exclusion is a result of individual
or neighbourhood attributes and how the resulting patterns of exclusion in
return change the neighbourhood.
In this workshop we invite papers with either a theoretical or an empirical
character, or both. Both quantitative and qualitative studies are welcomed
and we are open for ‘structure’ and institutional oriented studies as well
as actor-oriented research. The focus should be on finding the mechanisms
through which neighbourhoods, institutions and neighbourhood actors exert
their influence and could, for example, include issues regarding social
networks (are these more important than territorial social compositions?),
social interaction, role models, peer group influences, internal and
external stigmatisation, institutional exclusion and other dimensions
shaping people’s opportunities.


Deadlines
* Sending abstracts (March 1st, 2006) - reply abstract accepted or not till
March 15th, 2006
* Sending papers (June 1st, 2006)
* Final program (June 1st, 2006)
* On-line Registration (until June 1st, 2006)




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