Hi all,

I'm forwarding this CFP for AAG, which I imagine will be of interest to some CRITters, on behalf of a colleague.

Cheers,

AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans

April 10-14, 2018

Paper session:

Decommissioned places: Theorizing urban and rural shrinkage and displacement in the era of deindustrialization and climate change

Discussant: Sara Safransky (Vanderbilt University)

Session organizer: Monica Barra (Graduate Center, City University of New York)

Session abstract:

Amidst rising seas, record-breaking weather events, and the ongoing decline of industrial cities, scholars across the social sciences are increasingly interested in how urban and rural communities are confronting the cultural and material shifts that accompany the un-development of shrinking and retreating places. Post-industrial cities like Detroit where the population has shrunk to a fraction of the inhabitants its spatial footprint was designed to accommodate, planners struggle to rectify shrinking municipal budgets and populations through scaling-back the overcapacity of infrastructures and social services to increasingly abandoned, or at least seemingly abandoned, areas of the city (Moss 2008, Safransky 2014). Rural coastal areas in places like Louisiana and Alaska as well as coastal cities like New York are struggling with similar choices as subsiding lands, rising seas, and increasingly unprecedented weather events compel policymakers and residents to take seriously the "case for retreat" (Koslov 2016) and transitioning landscapes as the fiscal and material burdens of living in environmentally vulnerable areas become more acute (Marino 2012, Maldonado et. al. 2013). Recent flood and hurricane events in major urban centers in Texas and Florida have only further brought the question of scaling-back urban development further into the spotlight. Scholars in environmental and urban studies across geography and cognate disciplines are frequently discussing these shared concerns in their subfields, but rarely have the opportunity to consider the connections between urban and rural environments that are similarly attempting to confront planned shrinkage and de-growth/relocation in the face of persistent economic downturns and environmental change.

What happens when we pull the literature on shrinkage in post-industrial cities towards conversations about climate change induced retreat and relocation (and vice versa)? How do these tracks of examining 'degrowth' and out-migration converge and diverge? This paper session proposes to bring together scholars working in rural and urban contexts within the US and abroad to share their research and consider the synergies, as well as key differences, between urban and rural communities confronting ongoing and new forms of being decommissioned and abandoned. Topics for consideration include:

• How does the literature on urban shrinkage and planned degrowth converge and diverge with emerging research on climate change induced retreat and relocation?
• What are the connections between urban and rural displacements and re-locations from different contexts in the US and abroad?
• What are the economic, infrastructural, and cultural constraints to retreat and degrowth?
• How have different communities framed their experiences and/or self-organized for alternative visions of displacement (or staying in place)?
• What happens to communities that are forced to relocate or retreat, who become urban and rural 'refugees' of economic downturns and environmental crises?
• What are the economic, environmental, or political forces at the helm of these cultural and material shifts? In what ways might they overlap between seemingly disparate geographies?
• How do decommissioned landscapes change? Who or what moves in after portions of a city or abandoned rural villages are vacated?
• Are there examples of urban and rural decommissioning processes that have produced positive (or at least more hopeful) social, environmental, and economic changes for displaced communities?

Please send paper abstracts by October 20th, 2017 to [log in to unmask]" target="_blank" style="font-size:12.8px">[log in to unmask].edu

Works cited

Koslov, L. (2016). The Case for Retreat. Public Culture, 28(2 79), 359-387.

Maldonado, J. K., Shearer, C., Bronen, R., Peterson, K., & Lazrus, H. (2013). The impact of climate change on tribal communities in the US: displacement, relocation, and human rights. Climatic Change, 120(3), 601-614.

Marino, E. (2012). The long history of environmental migration: Assessing vulnerability construction and obstacles to successful relocation in Shishmaref, Alaska. Global environmental change, 22(2), 374-381.

Moss, T. (2008). ‘Cold spots’ of urban infrastructure: ‘Shrinking’ processes in eastern Germany and the modern infrastructural ideal. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(2), 436-451.

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