Morning all,
Please see below our call for papers for our proposed session on neighbourhoods and social infrastructure at this year's RGS-IBG conference in Newcastle (30th August - 2nd September). We hope you consider sending us your papers!
All the best,
Alan Latham and Jack Layton
Call for Papers: Neighbourhoods and social infrastructure: Recovering the social in post-Covid cities.
RGS IBG 2022, Geographies beyond recovery, 30 August - 2 September, Newcastle University
Social infrastructures are places that allow people to gather. Places that support community life. Places that allow friends and relatives to spend time together, and to care for each other. Places that allow people to crowd together, experience culture together. Places that encourage people to exercise, play sport, dance. Places that allow people to live comfortably alone and alongside one another. The places in cities that support social connection. In the ongoing response to and recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic people in cities and towns across the UK and elsewhere found a renewed appreciation for social infrastructures. People appreciated the public and quasi-public spaces in neighbourhoods that allowed them to spend time safely with one another, or mourned the loss of such spaces and facilities that could not be used. Moreover, people were reoriented to the spaces near where they lived and had easy walkable access to – raising questions of what people wanted from the cities and neighbourhoods in which they live.
For the planned paper sessions at the RGS-IBG we are seeking proposals that address the following questions, that can make empirical, conceptual or theoretical contributions to the emerging literature on social infrastructures within human geography and the social sciences more generally:
> What counts as social infrastructure?
> What can studies of social infrastructure tell us about ‘infrastructure’?
> How are different social infrastructures provided and maintained?
> How are social infrastructures provided in different cities around the world?
> How can social infrastructures be designed to invite in diverse uses, and include marginalised groups?
> How has the balance between commercial and public funding affected how social infrastructures are provided, and the social life of those spaces?
> What is the relationship between social infrastructure and neighbourhood?
> How has Covid-19 transformed understandings of social infrastructure and urban social life?
By bringing together a wide range of scholars addressing these critical questions, this session aims to explore the role of social infrastructures in supporting communal life in urban and suburban neighbourhoods. It raises critical questions about the design, provision, and maintenance of spaces and facilities near where people live that can support and sustain a rich and varied social, public life. The session will also be a space for debate around the different meanings and use of social infrastructure (Hall, 2020; Campbell, et al. 2022; Klinenberg, 2018; Middleton and Samanani, 2021). The session will make contributions to longstanding debates in urban scholarship around the meaning of public spaces (Qian, 2020; Koch and Miles, 2021), and the urban social (Blokland, 2017; Amin, 2008), and returning to older ideas of neighbourbourhoods (Talen, 2018; Sennett, 2018).
Please send abstract proposals to both Alan Latham ([log in to unmask]) and Jack Layton ([log in to unmask]) by Friday 4th March 2022. We plan to attend the conference in person, but will welcome submissions from those that would like to contribute remotely.
References:
Amin, A (2008) Collective culture and urban public space. City 12(1): 5-24.
Blokland, T. (2017) Community as Urban Practice. Oxford: Wiley.
Campbell, L, Scendsen, E, Johnson, N, and Landau, L (2021) Activating urban environments as social infrastructure through civic stewardship. Urban Geography (online pre-print)
Hall, S. (2020) Social reproduction as social infrastructure. Soundings, 11 June 2020.
Koch, R and Miles, S. (2021) Inviting the stranger in: Intimacy, digital technology and new geographies of encounter, Progress in Human Geography, 45, 6: 1379-1401
Middleton, J and Samanani, F (2022) Whose city? Whose sociality? Urban Geography (online pre-print).
Qian, J. (2020) Geographies of public space: Variegated publicness, variegated epistemologies. Progress in Human Geography 44(1): 77-98.
Sennett, R. (2018) Building and Dwelling. London: Penguin.
Talen, E (2018) Neighborhood. Oxford: Oxford University.
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