Call for papers for the workshop ‘The New Urban Ruins: Vacancy and the post-crisis city’ (Trinity College Dublin, March 1-3 2017)

The workshop proposes to explore how contestations over the reuse of vacant spaces can be used to think about cities and urbanisation in new ways. While spaces of ruination and abandonment have long held a fascination for us, in recent years there has been an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the subject in academic and popular discourse (DeSilvey and Edensor 2013).  Scholarly interest has ranged from a focus in ‘shirking cities’ in Europe (Gribat and Huxley, 2015), the increasing visibility of, and contestations over, ‘rustbelt’ cities in the US (Safransky, 2014), to the potentialities of ‘reusing’ vacant spaces for alternative purposes (Bishop and Williams, 2012). One vector of this recent interest in urban vacancy has been in the vast swathes of ‘new ruins’ (Kitchin et al, 2014) deposited across many countries in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.  The effects of the crisis in terms of stalled, unfinished and vacant developments, stagnant property markets, and iconic ‘new ruins’ has at once made vacancy a more visible and politically significant feature of many cities (O’Callaghan et al, 2014). Vacant or unfinished developments have been implicated in the processes of financial and real-estate speculation that drove the global economy into meltdown and in popular narratives about the crisis in countries including Spain and Ireland (Kitchin et al, 2014; Royo, 2009). In response, a range of different actors have attempted to lay claim to ‘new ruins’, and by extension vacant spaces more generally, both in terms of temporary and more ‘permanent’ interventions (Bresnihan and Byrne, 2015; Di Feliciantonio, 2016; Ferreri 2015; O’Callaghan and Lawton, 2016). This has included policy actors, financial and real-estate interests, cultural and grassroots organizations, political activists, and academics.

Considered in this way, vacant space will play a key role in determining how cities of the future respond to the both urban problems and wider global challenges. Policy responses have variously promoted the recycling of vacant spaces back into the orbit of property development and financial speculation, or their reuse to create the spatial conditions for alternative types of cities to emerge. 

This workshop aims to build a network of scholars interested in the topic of urban vacancy, to develop conceptual and methodological approaches, and to engage with policy-makers, civil society groups, and activists in different contexts.  As such, the aims are conceptual (develop new theoretical approaches on urban vacancy), empirical (discover new insights from case-studies in different cities/contexts) and applied (enable new conversations between activists and policy makers in different contexts). The workshop will be an output of the IRC New Horizons research project ‘The new urban ruins: vacancy and the post-crisis city’, led by Cian O'Callaghan (Trinity College Dublin).  The project focuses primarily on Dublin, with smaller comparative case-studies in Berlin and Barcelona. 

We are looking for papers that explicitly or implicitly use urban vacancy as a theoretical lens or empirical site to examine contemporary urban issues, broadly considered.  We also particularly welcome contributions on non-Western or global South cities. We invite contributions focusing on, but not limited to:

·      The politics of housing activism and/or new social movements around squatting/reclaiming vacant space.

·      Studies of ‘temporary use’ projects and their relationship with wider processes of urban change.

·      Critical approaches to studying urban ruins.

·      Studies that focus on the social geographies of urban abandonment.

The organisers plan to publish the workshop papers as a special issue of a journal in geography/urban studies. For this purpose, selected participants will be invited to send a preliminary draft of their papers before the workshop.

Please submit an abstract of 250 words to Cian O’Callaghan ([log in to unmask]) and Cesare Di Feliciantonio ([log in to unmask]) by 21 November 2016. Decisions over acceptance will be communicated by 02 December 2016. A limited number of bursaries to partially cover travel and accommodation expenses may be available.  

References

Bishop, P., & Williams, L. (2012). The temporary city. London: Routledge.

DeSilvey, C., & Edensor, T. (2013). Reckoning with ruins. Progress in Human Geography, 37(4), 465-485.

Di Feliciantonio, C. (2016). Social Movements and Alternative Housing Models: Practicing the “Politics of Possibilities” in Spain. Housing, Theory and Society, 1-19.

Ferreri, M. (2015). The seductions of temporary urbanism. ephemera, 15(1), 181.

Gribat, N., & Huxley, M. (2015). Problem Spaces, Problem Subjects: Contesting Policies in a Shrinking City. Planning and Conflict: Critical Perspectives on Contentious Urban Developments, 164.

Kitchin, R., O'Callaghan, C., & Gleeson, J. (2014). The New Ruins of Ireland? Unfinished Estates in the Post‐Celtic Tiger Era. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(3), 1069-1080.

O'Callaghan, C., Boyle, M., & Kitchin, R. (2014). Post-politics, crisis, and Ireland's ‘ghost estates’. Political Geography, 42, 121-133.

O’Callaghan, C., & Lawton, P. (2016). Temporary solutions? Vacant space policy and strategies for re-use in Dublin. Irish Geography, 48(1), 69-87.

Royo, S. (2009). After the fiesta: the Spanish economy meets the global financial crisis. South European Society and Politics, 14(1), 19-34.


Safransky, S. (2014). Greening the urban frontier: Race, property, and resettlement in Detroit. Geoforum, 56, 237-248.