*Apologies for cross-posting*
AAA CfP: "The Center Cannot Hold?" Political Geometries in the
Polycentric City
Please find below our call for papers for an invited session at the AAA
meeting in Washington DC this December.
We invite papers submitted by anthropologists and colleagues from
neighbouring disciplines. We look forward to receiving your abstracts
(maximum 250 words) by Friday 4th April. Please email proposals to:
Jonathan Bach ([log in to unmask])
Michał Murawski ([log in to unmask])
Please feel free to circulate this CfP among colleagues in your
networks.
With best wishes,
Jonathan and Michał
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"The Center Cannot Hold"? Political Geometries in the Polycentric City
Conveners:
Jonathan Bach (The New School, New York)
Michał Murawski (University of Cambridge)
Short abstract
Scholars, planners and politicians have declared the death of the
‘monocentric’ cities of old, whether theocratic-feudal ones dominated by
soaring temples, or industrial-capitalist ones pivoted around downtown
‘Central Business Districts’. But what role do – old and new –
‘epicentric’ spaces and landmark buildings continue to play in the 21st
century ‘polycentric’ city? What centripetal and centrifugal dynamics
characterize and co-produce the political-economic, aesthetic,
ideological and affective lives of cities today? How do urban centres,
peripheries and hinterlands overlap with and depend on one another?
Long abstract
In recent decades, the world’s most influential planning theorists,
economists and political scientists – from Jane Jacobs to Economics
Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Elinor Ostrom – have attested to and
hastened the dismemberment of ‘inflexible’ and ‘authoritarian’ urban
monocentricity. In its place, polycentricity – equated by today’s
commentators and administrators with a more efficient and fairer
distribution of work, residence and government – has consolidated itself
as the hegemonic spatial from of (neo)liberal-democratic urbanism. This
anti-centric political geometry coheres well with what Clifford Geertz
(crediting Alfred Kroeber) has characterized as anthropology’s
long-standing ‘centrifugal impulse’. Indeed, urban anthropologists
today, committed to rendering the ‘irreducibility’, ‘complexity’ and
‘partiality’ of urban life – to analytically ‘de-centering the city’ –
have tended to shy away from affording descriptive prominence to urban
epicenters.
There is much evidence to suggest, however, that epicentric spaces
continue to radiate over the – mundane and extraordinary – everyday
lives of cities and their inhabitants; and to act as pivotal points for
processes with city-wide, regional, national and supra-national (or
geopolitical) resonances. The ancient epicenters of Moscow, Mexico City,
Mecca, Beijing, Jerusalem or Athens reign uncontested as terrains of
sacred and symbolic concentration (even if, as in Mecca, their physical
make-up has been radically altered). Many planned epicentric spaces from
the 19th and 20th centuries – in Cairo, Kiev, Kharkiv, Istanbul or
Brasilia – have been the sites for a dramatic burgeoning of urban
protest during the past half-decade; whereas landmark structures and
ensembles inherited by new regimes from old ones in cities like
Bucharest, Berlin and Warsaw – where the unmaking of political economies
and ideological cosmoses is manifested with accentuated clarity – serve
as readymade ideal types for transitologists. What is more, axial
avenues and gargantuan landmarks are being raised today with no less
flair and frequency than during the Haussmanian late-19th century and
high-modernist mid-20th. Amid reconstituted Prussian castles, relocated
Asian capitals, post-socialist sacred complexes, central African
tech-hubs and Chinese eco-cities, myriad political geometries are at
work: de-centralizing rhetoric mingles with despotic decisionmaking,
axial symmetries with speculative financing.
Across the ancient, modern and emerging urban world, therefore, complex
and contradictory dynamics link (and unlink) centres to peripheries.
This panel seeks to problematize the notion of an inevitable march
towards urban polycentricity, and to explore what might be gained from a
descriptive and/or analytical ‘re-centering’ of urban anthropology. The
conveners invite contributions, which flesh out how centrifugal and
centripetal political geometries – as well as economic, aesthetic,
ideological and affective ones – are planned and lived in the everyday
lives of cities, and in particular of their epicentric spaces.
--
Dr Michał Murawski
Affiliated Lecturer
Division of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane
Cambridge CB2 3RF
Email: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]
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