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<bold><color><param>0100,0100,0100</param><FontFamily><param>Garamond</param><bigger>‘Urban’ politics in a relational age: governing cities and circuits of knowledge and capital</bold> Paper session sponsored by the Economic Geography, the Political Geography and the Urban Geography Research Groups of the RGS-IBG. RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2006, 'Global social justice and environmental sustainability', 30th August-1st September 2006. Although writing from different theoretical standpoints, both Loïc Wacquant (1999: 321) and Wendy Larner (2003: 510) appear to agree that the challenge to understanding the apparent urbanisation of neo- liberalism (Brenner and Theodore 2002) is to trace link by link the intellectual, policy and practitioner networks that have made this condition possible. This collection of papers seeks to meet the theoretical and methodological challenges this necessarily involves, through an examination of the circuits of expertise, ideas and knowledge involved in the current making of cities as governable spaces. This has seen an internationally heralded renaissance in urban fortunes matched only by the growth in think tanks, private consultants, professional trade bodies and others with a stake in the defining and auditing of this apparent reversal of trends. More abstractly, if it was ever possible to claim otherwise, this apparent increase in the political porosity of the city challenges the very notion of it as a bounded entity (Amin 2005). Instead it appears now to make more sense to understand the city as ‘a constellation of processes rather than a thing … open and as internally multiple’ (Massey 2005: 78). The session will examine this emergent urban political arena and the organisers invite papers that offer theoretical developments and/or specific case studies and/or comparative analysis. <flushboth><bold>Keywords</bold>: urban politics; governance; neo-liberalism</flushboth> Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to both convenors by no later than 20 January 2006. <bold>Convenors: </bold> - Eugene McCann, Simon Fraser University, Canada [log in to unmask] - Kevin Ward, University of Manchester, UK [log in to unmask] <nofill> Kevin Ward Director of Research School of Environment and Development The University of Manchester Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL 0161 275 7877