** With apologies for cross-postings **
Call for papers AAG 2019 Washington DC 3-7 April 2019
Financing Urban Fantasies: Logics, Practices, and Politics of Making Mega-projects in Frontier Cities
Organizers: Kelly Wanjing Chen (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA) & Jorn Koelemaij (Ghent University, Belgium)
Key words: frontier urbanization; transnational real estate development; worlding cities; speculative urbanism; state-rescaling
'Urban fantasies' that arise at the frontiers of the contemporary global property market remain a largely uncharted territory for urban and economic geographers. It entails the making of mega real estate projects that invoke trendy urban models like 'smart', 'eco', 'global' cities etc. in the context of late development and late urbanization. These urban visions often sit in sharp contrast with their situated contexts characterized by steep poverty and rurality. They are thus qualitatively different from what has been discussed in existing literatures concerning inter-city referencing and policy mobilities. Although some pioneering work has highlighted the marginalizing impacts these fantasy-making projects have on the urban poor in their discursive construction and material fallout, the mechanisms through which they enable speculative capital accumulation largely remain a black box. On a broader level, 'otherworldly tales' of cities are often invented by the nexus of the private sector and the state as an instrument to 'insert' frontier property markets into the global pool of capital. Yet the politics and practices undergirding the financing of 'urban fantasies' require a closer look, given that many have turned into a cityscape of unused or underused spaces in their phase of materialization.
In this session, we would like to bring together researches examining the governance behind transnational urban mega-project development at the forefront of the global property market. We welcome papers covering (but not limited to):
--varieties of foreign capital financing urban fantasies in contemporary property frontiers;
--conditions that engender the spatial mobility of capital from source to destination;
--logics, strategies, and politics of accumulation underlying speculative urban projects;
--interactions between foreign investors, local elite, and state in governing frontier urbanization.
--both quantitative and qualitative contributions to the listed themes
Interested participants are invited to send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Kelly Wanjing Chen ([log in to unmask]) and Jorn Koelemaij ([log in to unmask]) by 12 October 2018. They will be notified by 19 October if their paper has been accepted for the session. They will then need to submit their abstract through the AAG website and provide their PIN to the organizers by 25 October to meet the AAG deadline.
Key literature:
Barthel, P.A. and Vignal, L., 2014. Arab Mediterranean Megaprojects after the'Spring': Business as Usual or a New Beginning?. Built Environment, 40(1), pp.52-71.
Goldman, M., 2011. Speculative urbanism and the making of the next world city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(3), pp.555-581.
Goodfellow, T., 2017. Urban fortunes and skeleton cityscapes: real estate and late urbanization in Kigali and Addis Ababa. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41(5), pp.786-803.
Nam, S., 2017. Urban Speculation, Economic Openness, and Market Experiments in Phnom Penh. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 25(4), pp.645-667.
Peck, J. and Theodore, N., 2015. Fast policy: Experimental statecraft at the thresholds of neoliberalism. University of Minnesota Press.
Roy, A, & Ong, A. eds. Worlding cities: Asian experiments and the art of being global. Vol. 42. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
Watson, V., 2014. African urban fantasies: dreams or nightmares?. Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), pp.215-231.
-- Cain, A., 2014. African urban fantasies: past lessons and emerging realities. Environment and Urbanization, 26(2), pp.561-567.
-- Bhan, G., 2014. The real lives of urban fantasies. Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), pp.232-235.
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