*apologies for cross posting*
Royal Geographical Society
Annual International Conference
28-31 August, 2018 | Cardiff, UK
Open panel/Call for papers
Deadline 10 February 2018
Contested Gentriscapes:
Intersectional and decolonial geographies of gentrification.
Session organizers:
Mr. Charalampos Tsavdaroglou
Post-Doc. Urban Planner, University of Thessaly, Greece
Mr. Phillipp Katsinas
Dr. Geography, King’s College, London, UK
The last years have witnessed a vast increase in research on gentrification as a planetary urban development strategy. A wave of interest emerged in monitoring and documenting gentrified landscapes across cities outside the Core, and it now appears to be a cliché to argue that gentrification is not simply an export of urban formations and developmental patterns from the Global North to the Global South, but reflects differential logics, histories, protagonists and levels of real estate, displacement and resistance practices. Nevertheless, there are few empirical studies to research the more complex, intersectional and hybrid geographies of gentrification, especially outside Western Europe and North America, and how the links between race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, religion, and class play out in different cities. The session thus explores the interplay of authoritarian, informal, patriarchal, green, and religious gentrification with strategies of city branding, touristification, pink-washing, (sub)cultural appropriation, resilience and creative economy policies. It further focuses on the role of social movements in contesting and struggling against displacement and gentrification policies and (re)claiming the right to the city, in a Lefebvrian ‘cry and demand’ for visibility, citizenship, social and political rights and the transformation of the urban space into an emancipatory space of commoning. Occupy and transenviromental movements, and social groups including people of colour, lgbtqi, indigenous people, precarious workers, and migrants, struggle and destabilize not only neoliberal urban policies but also (post)colonial, racial and patriarchal roles, and socio-spatial power relations. Thus, decolonial, feminist, queer, indigenous, subaltern and global South scholarship on urbanisation could open new perspectives on the analysis of gentrification.
In this direction, the panel welcomes proposals including among others:
a) Dialectic, decolonial and intersectional perspectives on gentrification and the right to the city in the Global North and Global South;
b) Comparative studies on urban social movements against gentrification;
c) Militant ethnographic research that questions the role of the researcher in movements for the right to the city.
Please submit your abstract of 250 words by 10th February 2018 to Charalampos Tsavdaroglou (tsavdaroglou.ch@