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Call for papers

*Urban Struggles in Mediterranean Cities:*

*The Right to the City and the Common Space*


https://urbanstruggles.net/

*Abstracts Submission Deadline: January 20th, 2018*



*International UnConference*

Athens, School of Architecture,

National Technical University of Athens

May 31th – June 3th, 2018



[download a pdf]
<https://urbanstruggles.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/CFP_Urban-Struggles-in-Mediterranean-Cities.pdf>



*Call For Papers: Urban Struggles in Mediterranean Cities*



In the late 60’s, Henri Lefebvre published his influential piece the “The
Right To The City” for the 100th anniversary of the publication of Marx’s
“Capital”, just before the revolutionary outbreaks in Paris, Prague, the
rest of Europe and the US. “The Right To The City” became a cornerstone in
radical thinking, thus, in urban social movements.

One of its basic theses is that:

*The city is a projection of society on the ground that is, not only on the
actual site, but at a specific level, perceived and conceived by thought,
(…) the city is the place of confrontations and of (conflictual) relations
(…), the city is the ‘site of desire’ and site of revolutions *(Lefebvre
1996[1968]: 109)[1] <https://urbanstruggles.net/#_ftn1>.

In recent years, the discussion on “The Right To The City” has been
enriched with the notion of the urban commons, which evokes territories
governed by a group of people, the commoners, and a social relationship
that underpins that governance. Commons do not exist *per se* but they are
constructed in times of social struggles constituted through social process
of commoning. Discussion on urban commons is articulated with the so-called
new enclosures and revolves mainly around critical geographers’ approaches
that focus on the “accumulation by dispossession” and conceptualize commons
as a new version of the “right to the city”. Significantly, during the
current urban struggles and revolts, the rebels do not just claim the urban
space from the sovereign power, but they occupy and tend to transform it
into an emancipatory common space. Through praxis of “relocation” and
“reinscription”, they produce hybrid spaces and collectively reinvent a
culture of coexistence. Moreover, they try to challenge the neoliberal
metropolitan time, as well as seeking to negotiate and going beyond
cultural, class, gender, racial, religious and political identities,
privileges and temporalities. Consequently, during rebel times the
protestors are transformed into an unpredictable and misfitted multitude
that produces unique and porous common spaces, spaces in movement and
threshold spaces. On the other hand, neoliberal urban policies tend to
appropriate and distort the common space through several methods like
forced evictions, gentrification and touristification processes, creative
city rhetorics and city branding policies that seek to improve the cities’
competitiveness. Thus, the discourse on “the right to the city” and on
“common space” has to be reconsidered, as the latter is becoming the hybrid
arena of cultural, political and social urban conflicts.

This international (un)conference attempts to elaborate a postcolonial,
decolonial and intersectional methodological framework that examines the
right to the city and emerging common spaces focusing on the cities of
Northern and Southern Mediterranean. These cities are figured as exemplary
places for neoliberal urban policies while simultaneously they constitute
the epicenter of urban riots and revolts. Characteristic examples are, *inter
alia*, the December 2008 uprising in Athens, the Arab Spring in 2011, the
Indignados movement in Spanish and Greek squares in 2011, the Gezi uprising
in Istanbul in 2013, the Balkan protests in 2013-2014 and the ongoing
migrants struggles across Mediterranean cities. At the same time, several
social struggles for and through urban commons have emerged across the
Mediterranean cities such as: housing projects, communal gardens,
self-organized health centers, self-organized theaters, social
kindergartens, social groceries, squats-social centers, collective
kitchens, give-away bazaars, barter structures, community time banks, DIY
offline networks and neighborhood assemblies constitute an emerging and
fruitful urban common spaces.

Certainly, the above social structures and mobilizations do not form a
single and homogeneous category; each of them has its own unique causes,
motives, characteristics and consequences, as well as particular internal
conflicts, contrasts and contradictions. In this view, the crucial
questions of the gathering are the following:

   1. How are the modes of communication, the characteristics and the
   identities of participants challenged, modified and troubled?
   2. How was the processes of setting up common spaces were grounded on
   the multitude of gestures of solidarity, the emotional, communicative and
   aesthetic interactions, through which the bipolar contrasts of
   native-migrant, legal-illegal, young-old, worker-unemployed, male-female,
   lgbtiq-straight, religious-atheist and slum dwellers-middle class were
   sought to be overcome?

In doing so, this conference will seek to examine the intermediate and
hybrid social relations and modes of communication in rebel spaces.



*Objectives*

50 years after the first publication of the “Right To The City” and 8 years
after the Arab Spring and the Indignados movement, the explicit goal and
ambition of this (un)conference is to elaborate an in-depth comparative
study on urban social movements in Mediterranean cities.

In this direction, we welcome proposals including among others:

a) Dialectic, decolonial and intersectional perspectives on the right to
the city and the common space;

b) Comparative studies on gender, class, racial, religious and cultural
dimensions of urban social movements in Mediterranean cities;

c) Counter-hegemonic approaches that focus on the contemporary
socioeconomic, political, regionalist and migrant crises in the different
sites of the Mediterranean region.



*Submission Procedure*

We welcome proposals for various kinds of interventions, including, but not
limited to:

   1. presentations of formal academic papers (there will be plenty of time
   for feedback and discussion)
   2. roundtables (short talks – open discussions)
   3. workshops: case-studies open to questions (sharing practical
   knowledge, working through a particular idea or problem, teaching a
   methodology, approach, or framework)
   4. artistic interventions (installations; exhibitions or screenings of
   visual work – film, photography, etc.)

Interested contributors are invited to submit before January 20th, 2018, a
presentation proposal of maximum 400 words. Abstracts should include:
title, type of proposal (paper, workshop, artistic intervention), keywords,
name of the author(s), name of the presenter, affiliation and full contact
details (please fill the submission form, link). Authors will be notified
by February 20th, 2018, about the status of their proposals.

There are *no fees*. The organizing crew will especially cater for those
unemployed or in precarious working conditions who wish to participate at
the unconference; accommodation will be secured in houses of participants
in the centre of Athens and money will be gathered during the conference to
ease the costs of travelling.

And edited volume of contributions will be launched after the unconference.



*Important Dates*

Abstracts Submission Deadline: *January 20th, 2018*

Notification of Acceptance: *February 20th, 2018*

Conference: *Athens, May 31th – June 2nd, 2018*



[1] <https://urbanstruggles.net/#_ftnref1> Lefebvre, H. (1996[1968]). *Writings
on Cities*. Oxford: Blackwell.

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