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Dear All, Please find a call for papers below - apologies for cross-posting. Thanks James Call for Papers, ‘Governing Experimental Spaces of Urban Transition’ RGS-IBG Conference 2015, Exeter University, 1-4 September 2015, Geographies of the Anthropocene. Session: ‘Governing Experimental Spaces of Urban Transition’ Session convenors: • Mike Hodson, University of Manchester [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> • James Evans, University of Manchester [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> • Kes McCormick, University of Lund [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Transitions to urban sustainability have become a concern for geographers in recent years (Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Bulkeley et al, 2011, Coenen and Truffer, 2012). Responding to contemporary economic, environmental, social and political challenges is widely seen to need fundamental reconfiguration of the urban built environment, and systems of energy, transport and food provision. From policymakers and decisionmakers there has been a profusion of ‘top-down’ visions, strategies and roadmaps that seek to orientate transitions activity. At the same time a variety of transition activities have emerged that display a more ‘bottom-up’ localist intent. In short, there has been a developing, contested discussion about what transitions might look like and what this might tell us about the direction of urban sustainability (Hodson and Marvin, 2014). The ability of local initiatives to stage experiments, whereby groups of urban actors develop and test new forms of urban living and infrastructure, has become a hot topic for academics and policy-makers alike. Yet, it is important to understand how and where such activities take place, the way they become constituted as forms of experimentation, and how these experiments gain wider traction. There are many different ways of thinking about the politics of experimentation in urban settings (Bulkeley and Castan Broto, 2013; Evans, 2011; Karvonen and Heur, 2013) and their role in socio-technical niche development (Verbong et al, 2008; Raven and Geels, 2010). We can think of purposive initiatives as ‘experiments [that] serve to create new forms of political space within the city, as public and private authority blur’ (Castan-Broto and Bulkeley, 2013). In some instances there has been formal designation of interventions as Urban Labs or Living Labs where experimentation involves innovation through integrating users as co-creators to address specific challenges (Evans and Karvonen, 2011; McCormick et al., 2013). In other instances experimentation involves less formalised initiatives that are influencing urban governance in more indirect ways. This session seeks to develop more nuanced geographical understandings of the variety and range of experimental responses, how they are governed, what they experiment with and what lessons can be learned. Three questions inform the session: 1) What kinds of spaces of urban sustainable transitions initiatives are opening up, which interests are involved and how are they organised? 2) What kinds of socio-technical interventions are envisaged and how are these to be achieved? 3) What are the key implications for contemporary urban governance? This session invites conceptual, empirical and/or methodological papers addressing but not limited to: • Substantive fields of energy, transport, food, green infrastructure, ICT or built environment initiatives or combinations of these. • Living Lab, Urban Lab interventions, zones, ‘smart’ developments or more ‘organic’ local initiatives. Including: the origins and historical precursors of such initiatives, how initiatives are governed and organised; who is involved and how; what their local and broader impacts are. • Relationships between initiatives and more formal urban governance. • Relationships and learning between different transition initiatives. • Implicit spatial and geographical understandings and assumptions inherent in these initiatives and broader policy and academic discourses of urban experimentation and transition. • Conceptual questions surrounding the distinctions between experiments, alternatives, niches and so forth, and the interplay between the broader academic traditions from which they are drawn. • Critical considerations of how theoretical work in Geography (e.g. assemblage thinking, network ontologies, performativity) might produce more nuanced understandings of urban experimentation and transition. • Methodological and research design innovations that can re-frame current understandings and capture new aspects of urban experimentation and transition. The session convenors require abstracts of no more than 200 words. It is anticipated that the format of the session(s) will be based on 15 minutes per presentation with 5 minutes for questions. Timings: • Deadline for submission of abstracts to the convenors: 9th February 2015 • Responses from session convenors by: 16th February 2015 (those selected are expected to cover all their own costs). • The session convenors will submit details of the session to the RGS by the deadline of 20thFebruary 2015. • Abstracts should be sent to all convenors [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> ].