Final Call for Papers: RGS/IBG
The New Politics of 'Sustainable' Urban Infrastructure
Around the world a wide variety of actors-public and private, experts and non-experts-are working together to transform various 'infrastructures'. From communities regenerating coastal walkways in India to guerilla energy grids in the Scottish Highlands, people are engaging with infrastructure in new ways. These efforts are increasingly framed by the rhetoric of community 'resilience' to climate change, or by the promotion of ecological services to augment anthropogenic infrastructure. But alongside these dominant policy discourses, the demand for new infrastructure is challenging existing social and political institutions. It requires new forms of 'public' engagement, new actors, and new political agendas.
Coalitions of actors are reconstructing natures and infrastructures from the bottom up, through initiatives like the Transition movement, opening up new spaces for political engagement with the urban transformation. At the same time, authorities are increasingly willing to experiment with sustainable technologies and alternative planning approaches that 'let a thousand flowers bloom', transforming cities into living laboratories for the study of sustainability. The construction of high profile eco-cities, towns and suburbs-and their various accoutrements---around the world is simply the most visible aspect of a veritable proliferation of experiments in sustainable building and landscape design that is being driven by the increasing urbanization of the global population.
This session explores the conceptual and empirical dimensions of these emerging engagements with urban infrastructures and their social and political implications. We are interested in papers that address both formal and informal examples, and the intersection between the two.
This session seeks to engage some of the following key questions:
* What new coalitions of actors are emerging to engage with urban infrastructures?
* How are infrastructural knowledges produced and used?
* Are grassroots movements like Transition Towns and climate change communities opening up new spaces of engagement with urban transformation?
* How do grass-roots movements intersect with the government and manage the challenges of co-operating with the authorities without being co-opted?
* How does local knowledge or 'placed knowledge' influence opportunities and reforms?
* Does engagement with urban infrastructure transform relations to nature and the city, and notions of (ecological) citizenship?
* What is the political status of these engagements with urban infrastructure?
* What are the dimensions of the city as 'laboratory'? Is it useful to talk about different types of urban 'experiments'? How does this affect the framing of sustainability?
* How do exemplary projects inform new urban infrastructure experiments?
* What are the implications for urban institutions?
* How do cities transfer knowledge across their political borders?
Expressions of interest to Rob Krueger ([log in to unmask]) or James Evans ([log in to unmask] ) by 10 Feb 2010.
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