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apologies for cross posting ... CFP: AAG Meeting, 24-28 February 2012, New York Troubling Urban Politics (co-sponsored by the Cultural Geography, Economic Geography, Political Geography and the Urban Geography Specialty Groups) Organizers: Allan Cochrane (Social Sciences, Open University), Eugene McCann (Geography, Simon Fraser University) and Kevin Ward (Environment and Development, University of Manchester) The literatures on ‘urban politics’ have always been a diverse and heterogeneous set of offerings. Although a dominant strand of work has highlighted the shift in emphasis from ‘old’ concerns over collective consumption and social reproduction to a ‘new’ urban politics centered on issues of competitiveness and economic development, the field has always been wider than this focus implies, including work on social, cultural, and environmental aspects of urban politics and work on the urban condition outside the North American urban politics ‘heartland.’ Most recently, there has been a troubling of some of the fundamentals. Anthropologists, planners, political scientists and sociologists, as well as human geographers, have set about reconsidering what goes into the making up of both the ‘urban’ and the ‘politics’ in ‘urban politics’. On the one hand, this work has argued for an appreciation of the ‘urban’ that understands space both territorially and relationally: from work which argues that urban politics is defined through engagements and entanglements with places elsewhere to that which sees the term as complicated by emerging global suburban and post-suburban expressions and forms. On the other hand, there are strands of research that have begun to question understandings of ‘politics’: from work which has begun to rethink the purchase that a comparative urbanism might have for the twenty first century, to that which suggests that it is necessary to explore the implications of this as a post-political moment. Quite what this means for the stability and coherence of the ‘urban politics’ field is not yet clear but we believe it to be an appropriate intellectual starting point for this call for papers. We invite contributions from a variety of theoretical and methodological positions, exploring a diversity of substantive possible themes including (but not necessarily limited to) those below. We hope that each paper will be written with reference to the ways in which its substantive focus and its theoretical and conceptual positions trouble the received wisdoms that have framed the study of urban politics. Topic suggestions: - Governance, struggle, and negotiation as differing modes of politics - Cities of protest - Justice and injustice in the city - Benchmarking, comparison and learning between cities - Climate change and carbon control as the new urban politics - Struggles and negotiations around urban ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’ - Health, disease, and urban politics - Collective consumption and social reproduction in the twenty first century - Exchanges, visits and learning between cities - Im/mobile urban policies and their mutations - The rescaling of urban politics, beyond the city - Informality and the everyday in cities - Migration, multiculturalism, and the politics of urban difference - Infrastructure and its provision and financing in the current economic crisis - Urban, suburban and post-suburban political forms - Food, hunger, and nutrition as objects of urban politics Authors are invited to submit a 250 word abstract (following the guidelines set out by the AAG http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers/abstract_guidelines) to the organizers, Allan Cochrane ([log in to unmask]), Eugene McCann ([log in to unmask]) and Kevin Ward ([log in to unmask]) by Monday 12 September 2011.