MOBILE URBANISMS
A two-day conference and open discussion
Dates: 29-30 November 2012
Location: King's College London
This year’s UGRG Conference will focus on the mobile, circulatory and
fluid characteristics of cities and urbanisation. The conference seeks to
explore how urban spaces and places are produced, reproduced and contested
by travelling policies, investment, architectural forms, aesthetic
cultures and social norms. It will consider the range of flows, networks,
modes and practices of people migrating and moving between and within
cities. And it will compare and contrast different ways of theorising and
representing cities that respond to dynamic entanglements of territorial
yet relational objects, actors, technologies and imaginations.
We are seeking contributions from a wide array of urban research around a
variety of geographical and historical contexts. We hope the informal and
supportive forum of the Conference will encourage discussion, debate,
learning and collaboration on these themes.
Guiding topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Historical perspectives on the mobility of ideas, policies, plans and
materials involved in city-making.
- Innovative ways of mapping, representing and comparing urban movement
across different spaces and temporalities.
- The role of mobility in reinforcing gender and health inequalities.
- How modes of moving around the city challenge understandings of urban
public spaces and relate to performances of citizenship.
- How circulation and mobility systems produce or undermine socio-spatial
urban relations, including processes of state-led gentrification.
- The roles of stoppages and slow-downs in new political mobilizations.
- The modalities in which different paces, speeds and rhythms of mobility
constitute and recompose urban spaces.
- How developers, consultants and policy-makers respond to and facilitate
economic opportunities created by urban circulation and movement.
- The spatialisation of different forms of urban mobility in relation to
financial instruments and contracts.
- The networks, routes and infrastructures through which urban models,
materials, technologies and ideas are exported/imported, travel and are
translated.
Papers and suggestions for the conference are welcomed from researchers at
any stage of their careers. We are also planning a session of 4 minute
presentations if you would like a quick opportunity to introduce and share
some of your research interests with the conference. We al
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