<bold><color><param>0100,0100,0100</param><FontFamily><param>Garamond</param><bigger>‘Urban’ politics in a relational age: governing cities and circuits of
knowledge and capital</bold>
Paper session sponsored by the Economic Geography, the Political
Geography and the Urban Geography Research Groups of the RGS-IBG.
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2006, 'Global social justice
and environmental sustainability', 30th August-1st September 2006.
Although writing from different theoretical standpoints, both Loïc
Wacquant (1999: 321) and Wendy Larner (2003: 510) appear to agree
that the challenge to understanding the apparent urbanisation of neo-
liberalism (Brenner and Theodore 2002) is to trace link by link the
intellectual, policy and practitioner networks that have made this
condition possible. This collection of papers seeks to meet the
theoretical and methodological challenges this necessarily involves,
through an examination of the circuits of expertise, ideas and knowledge
involved in the current making of cities as governable spaces. This has
seen an internationally heralded renaissance in urban fortunes matched
only by the growth in think tanks, private consultants, professional trade
bodies and others with a stake in the defining and auditing of this
apparent reversal of trends. More abstractly, if it was ever possible to
claim otherwise, this apparent increase in the political porosity of the
city challenges the very notion of it as a bounded entity (Amin 2005).
Instead it appears now to make more sense to understand the city as ‘a
constellation of processes rather than a thing … open and as internally
multiple’ (Massey 2005: 78). The session will examine this emergent
urban political arena and the organisers invite papers that offer
theoretical developments and/or specific case studies and/or
comparative analysis.
<flushboth><bold>Keywords</bold>: urban politics; governance; neo-liberalism</flushboth>
Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to both convenors by
no later than 20 January 2006.
<bold>Convenors: </bold>
- Eugene McCann, Simon Fraser University, Canada
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- Kevin Ward, University of Manchester, UK
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<nofill>
Kevin Ward
Director of Research
School of Environment and Development
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL
0161 275 7877
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