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2013 SASE Conference, Milan, Italy
CALL FOR PAPERS for the mini-conference:
Cities in crisis: The urban political economy of the global recession
Organizers:
Manuel Aalbers, University of Leuven, Belgium, [log in to unmask]
Ugo Rossi, University of Turin, Italy, [log in to unmask]
The credit crunch of 2007-08 emanating from the subprime mortgage crisis in US cities and the subsequent global recession have demonstrated how urban economies are at the heart of the functioning and the contradictions of contemporary capitalism in a context of hegemonic yet inherently variegated neoliberalism. Almost half a decade into the global economic crisis, social scientists concerned with urban issues look at the crisis as a structural condition with which contemporary cities and regions have to deal rather than merely an episodic conjuncture.
At the city level, the crisis has an ambivalent function. On the one hand, it acts as a disciplining force, accelerating the evolutionary process within local economies as well as rationalizing the ways in which cities are being governed. On the other hand, the crisis reinvigorates the capitalist rationality intrinsic to the urban process, by pushing politico-economic elites to valorize cities as spaces of economic experimentation through a variety of governance and accumulation strategies. Cities are therefore both epicentres and victims of the global crisis as well as places that appear to have the potential to offer solutions to the structural problems affecting capitalist economies. We suggest that these processes are best studied from a renewed political economy perspective on urban re/development and governance. Yet, the urban political economy lens not only offers a perspective from which to study cities, it also offers a rich empirical context from which to study contemporary capitalism.
This mini-conference looks for contributions addressing the following thematic strands:
- Cities and late neoliberalism: we understand ‘late neoliberalism’ as a form of neoliberalism permeated by a multidimensional condition of crisis: crises of legitimation (discursive-moral), accumulation (economic-capitalist), governance (political-administrative). How is coping with these multiple crises reshaping the urban experience across the globe? How does this help us rethink the way in which neoliberalism is commonly understood?
- Cities and the austerity-growth dialectic: in times of crisis, municipal governments are requested to implement austerity measures, but are also expected to devise strategies of economic regeneration. How do urban politico-economic elites deal with this antinomy? What are the adaptation mechanisms, governance structures and institutional capacities being deployed in this context?
- Cities and financialization: the financialization of home, infrastructure and urban re/development more widely speaking were distinctive features of the expansionary era of neoliberalism. Foreclosures, repossessions and ghost residential spaces as well as overleveraged local governments have then characterized the landscapes of cities after the credit crunch. How are local governments, urban residents and the housing sector responding to the disastrous failures of financialization?
- Cities and alternative models: cities can be spaces of despair, but also spaces of hope in which grassroots experiments may mature and eventually transcend the local context. If it is true that challenges to hegemonic models rise from alternative models at the local scale, what role can and do specific cities and communities play in such alternative models? How do city residents and local governments try to work outside the box of late neoliberalism?
Please visit the SASE website for practical instructions: https://sase.org/2013---milan/mini-conferences_fr_158.html
Deadline for submissions is January 14.