-- CALL FOR PAPERS --

American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting

New Orleans, Louisiana, April 10-14, 2018

 

Rethinking urban vacancy: ruins, re-use and politics in the ‘post-crisis’ city

 

Organiser: Cian O'Callaghan (Department of Geography, Trinity College Dublin)

 

The prevalence of unfinished developments, underutilised land, and ‘new ruins’ (Kitchin et al, 2014) in recent years has made “vacant space”, in various manifestations, a more visible and politicised feature of post-crisis urbanisation.  The scale and severity of property bubbles in countries such as Spain, Portugal, Ireland and the US, coupled in some instances with foreclosure crises, left vast landscapes of stalled, unfinished or vacant developments and stagnant property markets. Debates about vacancy have been prominent in narratives about ‘crisis’, while escalating evictions in various urban contexts has politicised the discrepancy between buildings lying vacant at a time when housing need and homelessness have exploded.  Contentious activist responses, including the occupation and squatting of vacant buildings to provide housing (Gonick, 2016; Roy, 2017), are indicative of vacancy as a point of political antagonism.  At the same time, the pervasiveness of underutilised urban space has also stimulated wider engagements with re-using vacant spaces in cities (Bresnihan and Byrne, 2015; Ferreri 2015). The growth in popularity of ‘temporary uses’ at a grassroots and policy level, for example, is testament to the increased visibility of vacant spaces and to a mounting pressure to allow for new models of access in order to create ‘alterative’ projects.  Such practices of “urban informality” have long been mirrored in Global South cities, where precarious property rights and limited formal employment opportunities have stimulated residents to pursue strategies that creatively remake liminal urban space for their own purposes (Caldeira, 2017; Ghertner, 2012; Roy, 2015; Simone, 2014).  Through contentious engagements with vacant spaces, there is the potential to reframe norms around land-use, property, and entrepreneurial urbanism.

 

These events are taking place against a backdrop of ‘post-crisis’ urbanisation – understood here to refer to both cities that have been affected by property crashes and to the more general ways in which the ideological legitimacy of “entrepreneurial urbanism” has been challenged following the global financial crisis.  Cities in both the Global North and Global South have been variously affected by ‘austerity urbanism’ (Peck, 2012), the growing financialisation of the built environment (Fields, 2017), and widening inequality (Wyly, 2015).  At the same time, bottom-up, experimental engagements with urban space, urban politics, and everyday urban infrastructure may have the potential to open up alternative future urbanisms (Caldeira, 2017).  Urban vacancy forms an important pivot around which such contestations will play out. In this way, vacant spaces have become key sites of urban governance; reframing the sets of actors involved in urban development and the possibilities of, and in, urban space (O’Callaghan et al, In press). 

 

Now is an opportune time to rethink the multiple resonances of urban vacancy, ruin, and re-use.

 

We welcome papers that explicitly or implicitly use urban vacancy as a theoretical lens or empirical site to examine contemporary urban issues, broadly considered, in different parts of the world.  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.

 

Please submit an abstract of 250 words to Cian O’Callaghan ([log in to unmask]) by 21 October 2017. Successful applications will be informed no later than 23 October, with a view to registering abstracts before the deadline of 25 October 2017.

Dr. Cian O’Callaghan
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography, School of Natural Sciences

Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin
Dublin 2, Ireland.
+353 1 896 1143
[log in to unmask]
https://www.tcd.ie/Geography/staff/CianOCallaghan.php

 

 

References:

Bresnihan, P., & Byrne, M. (2015). Escape into the city: Everyday practices of commoning and the production of urban space in Dublin. Antipode, 47(1), 36-54.

Caldeira, T. P. (2017). Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), 3-20.

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

Fields, D. (2017). Urban struggles with financialization. Geography Compass.

Ghertner, D. A. (2012). Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle Class Discourses of a Slum‐Free Delhi. Antipode, 44(4), 1161-1187.

Gonick, S. (2016). From Occupation to Recuperation: Property, Politics and Provincialization in Contemporary Madrid. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research online first, doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12392

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; Di Feliciantonio, C; Byrne, M (In Press) Governing urban vacancy in post-crash Dublin: Contested property and alternative social projects. Urban Geography, In Press.

Peck, J. (2012). Austerity urbanism: American cities under extreme economy. City, 16(6), 626-655.

Roy, A. (2005). Urban informality: toward an epistemology of planning. Journal of the american planning association, 71(2), 147-158.

Simone, A. (2014). Jakarta, Drawing the City Near. University of Minnesota Press.

Wyly, E. (2015). Gentrification on the planetary urban frontier: The evolution of Turner’s noösphere. Urban Studies, 52(14), 2515-2550.