-apologies for cross posting - 

I'm chairing this session at the RGS next year and thought some people might be interested. 

Abstracts are invited for a session held by the GIScience Research Group (GIScRG) at the Royal Geographical Society – Institute of British Geographers International Conference 2012. The conference runs between 3rd – 5th July 2012.

More about the session:

In December 2011 The Portas Review put forward 28 recommendations to the UK government regarding the future of ‘our’ high street.  Within the report and surrounding media there is a sense of ‘crisis’ associated with such spaces and by implication with the ‘moral values’ of ‘community’, ‘localism’ and ‘sense of belonging’ associated with high street.  Such approaches show that attention needs to be paid the spaces of the everyday such as the UK high street to further understand what these spaces do in an economic, social and cultural sense and how changes in such spaces affect not only economic stability but orderings and understandings of such ideas as ‘local’ ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘identity’.
With approaches within the social sciences from authors such as Ingold (2007) and Massey (2005) the role of materiality and spatial practices in everyday social life is receiving increasing attention.  Within this the role of the physical configuration of the built environment and its relationship to the social organisation of everyday life, much potential exists to either advance current understandings or develop new critical understandings of the role of the spaces of the built environment in social relations.
We invite proposals for papers that present critical work on change or continuity of the ‘public spaces of the everyday’, such as the suburban high street through collaborative and mixed methods approaches across a range of disciplines including GIS, architecture, anthropology and sociology. We welcome proposals that work across disciplines and in particular combine quantitative and qualitative approaches.  Preference is for work that combines historical perspectives to the suburban realm and high street although we welcome submissions of critical investigation of the relationship between shifting patterns of economic, social and cultural land uses and the types of socio-spatial relations they engender in other ‘spaces’.

The GIScRG will provide one bursary for this session, sponsored by the GIScRG for a paper (co-)authored by a postgraduate student; priority will be given to postgraduate students also delivering the paper. The bursary will cover the reduced conference fee for the student for the duration of the conference. It is a requirement that the student is an RGS-IBG Postgraduate Fellow at the time the bursary is awarded [Annual membership costs from £27 (with no joining fee)].

Participants are asked to use an innovative style of presentation; to prepare a presentation with full-slide images, with a maximum of ten words per slide. We intend to accept only four presentations to allow for discussion time. The abstracts will be circulated to presenters and they will be asked to prepare responses to key ideas from all the abstracts in order to enable a useful discussion at the end of the session. Titles and abstracts (up to 500 words) for this session should be sent to both David Jeevendrampillai ([log in to unmask]) and Ashley Dhanani ([log in to unmask]) by Monday 9th January 2012. The session conveners (David Jeevendrampillai, Ashley Dhanani, Mordechai (Muki) Haklay and Laura Vaughan) are members of theAdaptable Suburbs project team at UCL.

http://giscience.org.uk/2011/12/19/call-for-papers-suburban-adaptability-continuity-and-change-rgs-ibg-annual-international-conference-2012/