CFP: Unjust transitions in the contemporary city: struggles, opportunities, and experiments.  

Urban Affairs Association Conference, New York City, April 24-27, 2024  

Instructions 

Please send 300 word paper proposals to Andrew Wallace ([log in to unmask]), Pratichi Chatterjee ([log in to unmask]) and Katy Wright ([log in to unmask]) by September 22nd, 2023. Please make sure your proposal fits UAA’s requirements for individual paper proposals. We will respond with a decision by September 28, 2023, allowing all participants to apply before the 1st Oct deadline. 

Panel overview 

The urgent need for wide-ranging societal transitions in the face of climate collapse is unanswerable. For some this means nothing less than shifting to a post-capitalist, post-growth world whilst others posit more gradualist solutions. The demand that such transitions should be ‘just’ is a familiar, if uncertain demand, especially for workers and citizens of contemporary cities. Capitalist urbanisation ensures cities have catastrophic carbon footprints which prioritise extractive real estate development whilst widely deracinating rights to a secure and healthy urban life. Polluted air and water, violent dispossession and ever more tightly surveilled mobilities are regularised experiences of contemporary urban life for millions. Vastly unequal urban and regional geographies are intersecting with climate collapse in complex ways, and it is in our cities that unjust transitions in our economic, political and social structures will be felt most keenly. 

Discourses of ‘sustainability’ have, of course reverberated around urban worlds for years. At their worst, these feed cynically into manifold ‘eco cities’ agendas with elite policymakers and urban entrepreneurs integrating the theory and practice of ‘transition’ into dubious urban development agendas (Anguelovski and Connolly 2021). Meanwhile, urban scholars have assembled important critical resources, bringing to attention, for example, the ‘missing pillar’ of ‘social’ sustainability and pointing out the spread of ‘green gentrification’ (Gossens, Oosterlynck and Bradt 2019; Immergluck and Balan 2017). On the ground, campaigners continue to cultivate their own transitional horizons (e.g. Chatterton 2016). 

This panel will reflect, expand upon and make critical sense of how unequal urban and regional worlds are producing unjust transitions within cities globally. We are particularly interested in the urban-focused experiments, projects and agendas which deploy the modus operandi of ‘transition’ but produce troubling outcomes, contentious politics and grassroots mobilisations across cities globally. We welcome papers which push beyond ‘green gentrification’ processes to critically address the wider panoply of technologies, investments and strategies adopted in the name of economic, social and political urban ‘transition’. We seek empirical and/or theoretical contributions from any methodological or disciplinary approach that have a distinct urban focus. Some suggested topics include: 

Experiments and innovations in ‘sustainable’ urban transitions 
Governance, planning and delivery 
Municipal strategy 
Entrepreneurial urbanism  
Green and other forms of transition ‘washing’ 
Urban technofixes 
‘Green’ jobs and trade unionism  
‘Left behind’ regions and communities 
Community development 
Brownfield regeneration 
Resistances, coalitions and alternative politics 
‘Sustainable’ urban lifestyles 
 

Organisers 

Andrew Wallace 
Associate Professor in Urban Sociology, University of Leeds, UK 
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Pratichi Chatterjee 
Research Fellow in Housing, University of Leeds, UK 
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Katy Wright 
Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, UK 
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