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Please contact Peter Hall ([log in to unmask]), Markus Hesse ([log in to unmask]), or Wouter Jacobs ([log in to unmask]) if you would like to participate in this session. Call for papers, AAG 2016, San Francisco, CA. March 29-April 2, 2016 “Trading city-regions” We invite papers that draw attention to how globally oriented trade activities influence the economic, social and political development and dynamics of cities and urban regions. Located between perspectives which emphasize what cities “are” (that is, unique local assemblages), and perspectives which emphasize the position of individual cities in hierarchies of activity and connection, this session is inspired by Marshall (1890), Jacobs (1985), (Cronon 1991), Noponen et al (1993), Fujita and Mori (1996), Storper (1997), Jones (1998), Coe et al (2004) and others to focus on what people and organizations in cities “do” that propels global trade from certain locations and not others. What are the geographies of trading activities? What places, events, relationships, dependencies, agents, institutions and processes should be considered in order to understand these geographies? What kinds of cities and urban regions do they produce? All cities encompass trading activities in a variety of places; from brokerages and banks, convention centres and airport lounges, to warehouses and ports. Trade activities include advanced business services (trade finance and merchant banking, cargo and shipping related insurance and risk management as well as all legal aspects concerning the international carriage of goods, etc), supply chain management and logistics , as well as transportation, warehousing and other physical activities related to inter-regional movement of goods and people. Agglomerations of such trading places and activities constitute distinct trading city-regions which are found across global and national urban hierarchies, including, for example: gateway cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, Shanghai, Tianjin, Incheon or Rotterdam; hub-cities such as Hong Kong, Houston, Dubai, or Singapore; places that bundle financial services and/or the digital economy such as Luxembourg, London, Frankfurt or New York; and even cities that are seat of multi-lateral organizations such as Geneva, Lausanne or Washington. In this session we seek perspectives from economic, urban, transportation, historical, social or cultural geographies, in order to decipher the trajectories, meanings and contradictions of cities and urban regions that specialize in all sorts of trade. We are interested in contemporary and historical perspectives, approaches which may range from the theoretical to the empirical, and that employ methods from case studies to quantitative analyses. Paper topics might include (but are not limited to): - Variegated territorialities of particular forms of trade, from commodities and merchandise to services and ideas. - The politics and governance of trading city-regions. - Social dimensions of trading cities, including migration, consumption, culture, environmental justice and inequality. - The economies of trading city-regions, including employment, firm formation, and supply chain relations. - Strategic positioning, investment and ‘coupling’ by elites (and counter-elites) in trading cities. - Spillovers and related varieties of trade activity, for example, from transportation into logistics, and commodity trading into finance. - The evolution of the multinational trading firms and their skills and routines. - Goods movement and trading cities, including physical impacts, land use and infrastructure. - Financialization and risk in trading cities. - Information infrastructure, knowledge systems, and meaning in trading places. - Policy mobilities of trading city-regions, and the ‘trade’ in ideas; - The historical geography of trading cities, and systems of trading cities (e.g. the Hanseatic League, Asian Treaty port cities, etc.). - Typologies and systems of contemporary trading cities in developed and developing nations. - Similar/related and competing conceptions of trading city-regions, such as gateways, knowledge hubs, and entrepôt, global or world cities. Please send us an abstract which we will slot into a session, by 1 October 2015. We look forward to hearing from you! Peter Hall ([log in to unmask]), Markus Hesse ([log in to unmask]), Wouter Jacobs ([log in to unmask])