Situating Urban Sustainability in the Context of Urban Theory and Policy
Organizers: Constance Carr (Université du Luxembourg), Markus Hesse (Université du Luxembourg), Rob Krueger (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA and Université du Luxembourg), and Christian Schulz (Université du Luxembourg)
Over the past decade a body of work has emerged one might call “critical sustainability studies.” While acknowledging more normative accounts of sustainable development (c.f. Beatley 2000; Portney 2003), these scholars have focused their analytical lenses on the political economic processes and practices of urban sustainability, thus choosing not to reify the concept and practice of urban sustainability. For example, Gibbs and Krueger (2007) examined urban sustainability planning practices were adopted in new economy spaces in response to intense competition for attracting new high-tech industries. In her study of environmental gentrification, Pearsall (2009) showed how urban regeneration and sustainability initiatives lead to a gentrification of erstwhile economically disadvantaged communities. Also in 2009, Moore examined the geographical variation among the implementation of new urbanist policies Toronto, Canada. Finally, Raco (2005) argued that urban sustainable development policies are embedded in a different ethical foundation than contemporary, or neoliberal, urban development schemes.
Raco’s insights implicitly call for an analysis of the role of ideas, actors, practices and representations in critical sustainability studies. More recently, borrowing from the political science literature (c.f. Bevir and Rhodes 2008), Krueger and Gibbs (2009, forthcoming) focused on actors’ beliefs, understood dilemmas, and traditions of governance, to examine how two seemingly contradictory ensembles of ideas – i) inter-urban competition, and ii) urban sustainability – can emerge simultaneously in policy development discourses. This understanding of the broader role of actors, informal infrastructures, and institutions play, have resulted in calls for “thicker” and more “fine grained” analyses of neoliberal policy reforms and their implications for urban development, in general, and sustainability, in particular.
In the session we seek wish to more closely align analyses to urban sustainability planning and practice as a process of urban development. What does urban sustainability have to offer? In principle, urban sustainability discourses offer a utopian vision of living and working in the city. “Doing,” or, as happens in most cases, “faking” urban sustainability requires elites to adopt, at least publicly, the tripartite concerns of sustainable development: economic prosperity, environmental integrity, and social equity. As Krueger and Palmer-Paton (forthcoming) show, more often than not sustainability initiatives bring economic prosperity to some, environmental amenities for those living near these “sustainable” enclaves, but the promise of social equity remains unfulfilled and, if on the agenda at all, merely an implied afterthought (c.f. Pearsall 2009, Krueger and Buckingham forthcoming). How do these seemingly progressive goals, which are often explicitly stated and imported from other places, get erased through urban policy implementation and institutional practice? How do actors that at once “embody” urban sustainability, exorcise it from policy discourses? How do systems of governance manage and overcome the stated goals of urban sustainability and the policy contradictions they embody?
In this context, we believe it is time for re-engaging sustainability as an urban development framework and to critically examine the conceptual and political nuances of this type of development and how it might inform broader urban and regional development theory. This session thus seeks international contributions that critically engage sustainability as an urban development strategy that has—in principle—a utopian vision, which is adopted and transformed in the policy development and implementation process. In other words, what and how do knowledge, rationalities, practices, representations, actors and institutions transform the laudable goals of urban sustainable developments into new modes of social exclusion and alienation? We welcome case studies, but we will give preference to those abstracts that reflect on these concerns in the context of contemporary debates in urban economic development.
Among other topics, we welcome conceptual and empirical papers that focus on:
• The post-political
· The urban growth machine
· Policy mobility
· Territoriality and relationality
· Comparisons between places
With sponsorship from: the Urban Geography Specialty Group and the Economic Geography Specialty group.
Abstracts should be no more than 250 words and submitted by September 10, 2011. For further information or to submit an abstract contact:
Constance Carr ([log in to unmask])
Rob Krueger ([log in to unmask], [log in to unmask])
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