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[Apologies for cross postings] Call For Papers *Tracing Asian Green Urbanism in a Global Context* Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Tampa, Florida April 8-12, 2014 Organizers: I-Chun Catherine Chang (University of Minnesota, US) and Sofia Shwayri (Seoul National University, South Korea) The past two decades have seen an explosion of green urban projects, large and small across the globe. While rooted in North American and Western European traditions, green urban initiatives are now mushrooming in Asia. These initiatives and practices are diverse, encompassing community-based eco-towns in Japan; government-led national programs of building new green cities in China, South Korea and United Arabic Emirates; and smart city and housing innovations in Singapore, as well as a budding sustainable city movement in India. They span spatial scales, encompassing smaller initiatives like roof gardening and community recycling to larger scale undertakings such as retrofitting aging urban districts or building entire cities from scratch, involving public and private actors, local and non-local agencies, in all forms of partnerships. Particularly intriguing are Asian green projects that have entered the broader knowledge circuits of different planning traditions, flagged as sustainable urban developments across different geographical regions. Chief among them are Singapore’s green urban projects, China’s Sino-Singapore Tianjin eco-city, Japan’s Kitakyushu Smart Community Project and South Korea’s Songdo ubiquitous eco-city. Through their domestic and international circulation, Asian green urban practices challenge existing Western paradigms of urban sustainability. However, scholarly understanding of the circulation of Asian green urban practices across different geographical locales and scales remains limited, as are the studies that focus on micro-practices of sustainability that expose particular histories and geographies of contexts within which these ideas emerge, flourish and take root, shaping the immediate and distant. Much effort has been directed towards researching transnational circuits of urban knowledge and planning models for economic development, housing and infrastructure projects, and much less on studying the mobility of green urbanism and sustainability ideas, policies and projects of the global South and East, both within the region and beyond. Deserving further examination are questions exploring the contexts, means and agents of inter-referencing of Asian green projects or studies that attempt to understand Asian cities as incubators for sustainable projects and nodes where green urbanism practices mutate. Inspired by the recent IJURR symposium (vol 37, issue 5, 2013) on planning histories and practices of circulating urban knowledge, we would like to invite papers that critically reflect on the travel of green urbanism ideas, policies and practice within Asia and beyond. Topics may include, but are not limited to the following: 1. Green urbanism ideas, projects and practices that either ‘traveled’ from elsewhere to or originate in Asia, and are shaped by specific local contexts; 2. Tracing ‘traveled’ histories of particular concepts, actors and institutions that facilitate the transference; 3. Micro-histories and contemporary circulation of green urbanism projects that shed light on urban development processes and modes of governance; 4. Histories of failed transfers of ideas, practices and projects; 5. Convergence, contestation, integration or re-assembling between Asia’s emerging green urbanism paradigms and those developed in the Western World; 6. Relocalization of Asian green urban ideas and practices in new places. Interested participants are invited to submit their paper title, abstract (no more than 250 words) and Presenter Identification Number (PIN) to session organizers at I-Chun Catherine Chang ([log in to unmask]) and Sofia Shwayri ([log in to unmask] ) by November 27th. Authors need to submit paper abstract first through the AAG website to obtain the PIN. Guidelines for preparing abstracts are available at: http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers/abstract_guidelines -- I-Chun Catherine Chang Doctoral Candidate Department of Geography, Environment and Society University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA [log in to unmask]