Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, 21-25 April, 2015, Chicago
DISPLACEMENT AS A GLOBAL URBAN STRATEGY
Organisers: CRUSH – Critical Urban Sustainability Hub (www.crushproject.se)
In cities across the globe, public authorities and property owners facilitate and implement tactics and tools to move no-income or low-income people away from certain places. Displacement of the urban poor often operates through a ‘territorial stigmatization in action’ (Wacquant, Slater and Pereira 2014) and is not a new phenomenon, but we could argue that what we are witnessing today is the systematic expansion of displacement tactics into a ‘global urban strategy’ to paraphrase Neil Smith (2002). The HOPE VI ‘mixed-income housing’ projects in the US (e.g. Goetz, 2010) and ‘renoviction’ strategies from Vancouver to Stockholm (Westin and Molina, 2012) are just two prominent examples of a wide range of displacement strategies – with or without active government involvement. ‘Displacement of the urban poor’ is of course closely related to processes of gentrification, but does not necessarily coincide with it (Wyly et al., 2010). Gentrification can lead to direct displacement, but not necessarily so, and, vice versa, displacement of the urban poor does not necessarily lead to ‘gentrification’. ‘Getting rid of the poor’ thus deserves attention in its own right as a distinct action of local authorities and property owners. We want to develop a more systematic and nuanced theoretical and empirical understanding of ‘displacement’ by bringing together and comparing examples, experiences and insights from different corners of the world.
This session seeks to address questions such as:
What examples of displacement tactics and tools exist across cities?
What are the roles and forms of cooperation between different actors (authorities, owners, inhabitants, activist groups) in processes of displacement?
How are displacement policies experienced by their victims?
What are the gender and race dimensions of displacement processes?
Where do displaced people move to?
What kind of organized resistance has grown out of displacement? What tactics have been deployed by opposing groups? What is the success and failure of resisting displacement?
In what ways do gentrification and displacement relate?
How can we understand the very notion of displacement (when does migration become ‘displacement’) and what methodological challenges do we encounter when researching displacement?
Can we as (critical) researchers contribute more to the displacement debate than sheer ‘exposure’?
Interested participants can submit their paper title, abstract (maximum 250 words) and Presenter Identification Number (PIN) to [log in to unmask] before October 20th. Guidelines can be found at: http://www.aag.org/cs/http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/how_to_submit_an_abstract.
References:
Goetz, E G (2010), Desegregation in 3D: Displacement, Dispersal and Development in American Public Housing, Housing Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 137-158
Smith, N (2002), New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy, Antipode, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 427-450
Wacquant, L, T Slater, V Pereira (2014), Territorial Stigmatization in Action, Environment and Planning A 2014, Vol. 46 (doi: 10.1068/a4606ge)
Westin, S and I Molina (2012), Renoviction - even in Sweden?: Four case studies on the regeneration of public housing estates, paper presented at the AAG 2012, New York
Wyly, E, K Newman, A Schafran, E Lee (2010), Displacing New York, Environment and Planning A, Vol. 42, pp. 2602-2623
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