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Call for papers - 2018 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting New Orleans, 10-14 April 2018 Life course, gentrification and urban inequality Organizers: Willem Boterman, Wouter van Gent, Cody Hochstenbach (Urban Geographies, University of Amsterdam) Gentrification is generally understood as the class-based transformation of urban space, but it is also imagined as being connected to young adulthood, as a spatial expression of the time-space trajectories of particular middle-class fractions. Although gentrification studies often do acknowledge age, we argue that life course should be treated as a key dimension to understand gentrification and segregation, and the inequalities it brings about in people's lives cumulatively. Acknowledging the central role of demographic processes in urban transformations may also help us gain insight into the political economies of life course. In urban development, state and market actors may favor certain groups while excluding others, not only across social class but also between generations and life stages. In many contexts, young adults are struggling on the housing market. This is likely to have spatial implications, as specific groups of young adults may be excluded from privileged areas or cities in general. Likewise, the intergenerational transmission of inequalities through housing wealth has spatial impacts. Age and life course may play a broader, more general, role in forging urban inequalities as well. We call for papers that investigate how life course is implicated in gentrification, urban transformation and urban inequality more generally, focusing on differentiation in age and generation. We seek papers from both the Global North and Global South dealing with the following, or related, topics: * The intersections of class and age in gentrification processes * How intergenerational inequalities and the intergenerational transmission of inequalities unfold in urban space * How urban transformations are changing the geography of demographic transitions * The role of generations in historical and contemporary urban transformations * Young people in gentrification processes as both displacers and the displaced * The cumulative effects of housing and neighborhood trajectories on life course and (dis)advantage * The politics of life course and age in urban development Please submit your abstract (max 250 words) with affiliation and contact details by email to Willem Boterman ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) before October 18th. Presenters will be notified by 20 October and asked to register for the AAG conference by 25 October 2017.