Apologies as always for cross-posting!

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AAG Meeting, Chicago, April 21^st-25^th 2015

Call for papers:

New Urban Mobilities and Racialization

North American cities are undergoing a cultural, economic and political renaissance. Despite the continued reign of austerity measures, severe restraints on municipal spending and exposure to the harsh winds of capital mobility, cities large and small across the continent have positioned themselves at the forefront of a broad, urban-centered cultural flowering and economic boom. Framed as dense nodes in the innovation economy, future sites of carbon-neutrality, and exciting spaces of encounter across difference, cities, both popular and academic writers tell us, are the normative future of North American urbanism as extensive suburbanization collapses under its own weight. There is a vibrant body of research that takes seriously the inequities that this renaissance relies on and reproduces. The goal of this session is to discuss the ways in which these shifts and their conditions of possibility are thoroughly racialized. The foundations of the urban renaissance in many ways depend on prior waves of producing race through urban space itself.

One arena emblematic of this shift is the newfound emphasis on urban mobility (Adey, 2014; Cresswell, 2010; Graham & Marvin, 2001; Sheller & Urry, 2006). Bus rapid transit (BRT) projects, bike sharing schemes, light rail corridors, active transportation programs, transit-oriented development projects, pedestrian enhancements, electric vehicle charging stations and "smart cities" networked infrastructure, the retrofitting of urban cores for enhanced mobility is a key feature of the current renaissance. Converging with the "creative economy" of technology, arts and design, the current emphasis on the intertwining of work, play and leisure in space, and the real estate-driven conversion of city life into "amenities," the new urban mobilities promise the supersession of the old, car-centric city. Yet these emerging practices can play a key role in the ongoing and shifting racialization of space, articulating with racialized processes of gentrification, racialized discourses of health, safety, crime, security, and unruliness, race-saturated notions of economic productivity, changing political identification along lines of race, and racialized practices of representation and identity (Bullard, Johnson, & Torres, 2004; Bullard & Johnson, 1997; Hoffmann & Lugo, 2014; Hutchinson, 2000; Kirouac-Fram, 2012; Stehlin, 2013).

For this session, we welcome papers from a variety of regional/geographic perspectives (not simply North American ones) on topics including but not limited to the following areas:

race, space and “new mobilities”

race and technics/infrastructure/objects

race and assemblage theory

race, gentrification, urban restructuring, regional difference, and economic forecasting/value-making

race, active transportation and health

race, embodied spatial practices, and bodily movement

new discursive framings of race and urbanism

comparative North-South/South-South racialization of mobility

 

Please email a short abstract by October 20^th to both John Stehlin ([log in to unmask]) and Emily Reid-Musson ([log in to unmask]).

Works Cited:

Adey, P. (Ed.). (2014). The Routledge handbook of mobilities. London: Routledge.

Bullard, R. D., & Johnson, G. S. (1997). Just transportation: dismantling race and class barriers to mobility. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

Bullard, R. D., Johnson, G. S., & Torres, A. O. (Eds.). (2004). Highway robbery: transportation racism & new routes to equity. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.

Cresswell, T. (2010). Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(1), 17–31.

Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. New York: Routledge.

Hoffmann, M. L., & Lugo, A. (2014). Who is “World Class”? Transportation Justice and Bicycle Policy. Urbanities, 4(1), 45–61.

Hutchinson, S. (2000). Waiting for the Bus. Social Text, 18(2), 107–120.

Kirouac-Fram, J. (2012). “Public Transportation is Very Important to Wal-Mart”: The Urban Bus and Race in the Neoliberal Age. Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 14(3-4), 160–184.

Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A, 38(2), 207–226.

Stehlin, J. (2014). Regulating Inclusion: Spatial Form, Social Process, and the Normalization of Cycling Practice in the USA. Mobilities, 9(1), 21-41.

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John Garrard Stehlin
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Geography
University of California, Berkeley

www.johngarrardstehlin.com