RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2018
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Urban Timescapes and the Politics of Speed
Session Convenor(s)
Günter Gassner (Cardiff University, UK)
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>Richard Bower (Cardiff University, UK)
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Abstract
Contemporary urban landscapes are changing at an ever faster pace. Driven by globally operating investors and private urban developers, as well as an ideology of economic growth and a consensus on neoliberal city-making practices, speed has become a vital characteristic of urban development. As cities develop new ways of staying competitive and attracting investment and revenue-generating tourists, what does a critical and political response to speed in and of the city involve?
An understanding that human practices create and make use of distinctive conceptualisations of space and time is crucial for a critical analysis of capitalism and processes of global urbanisation and their social, economic and political implications. Whether Walter Benjamin’s rejection of a progressive historical narrative in which time concerns itself only with speed and his alternative conceptualisation of history as concentrated on a single focal point, David Harvey’s exploration of relational space and his Leibniz-inspired theoretical framework for envisaging and realising the social and cultural production of alternative spatio-temporalities, Doreen Massey’s understandings of space as a dynamic product of interrelations and an open process of becoming, or the more recent debate of global urbanisation by Neil Brenner, these critiques are often framed by the need to redress the balance of power between time and space.
Whilst the conditions and implications of time and space in cities continue to be explored and contested, the notion and politics of speed – acceleration, slowness, relativity and relationality – remain often under-examined. If speed is vital to urban development, slowness and the protraction of time might be essential to politics. In the search for ‘deep democracy’, Arjun Appadurai, for example, argues for a politics of patience in informal city spaces in the Global South and, in so doing, not only recognises contrasting speeds in the city but, moreover, empowers locally specific and globally-networked urban agencies in emergency situations and contexts.
This session will consider notions of speed in contemporary cities and explore conceptualisations and responses and their political values. Papers can include, but are not limited, to a theoretical engagement with Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, post-structural and post-political theories; they can include empirical analysis as well as urban design considerations and implications, addressing questions like:
- How do different human practices create and make use of distinctive conceptualisations of speed in the city and to what end?
- How can notions of speed and politics – slowness, rupture of event – be re-perceived in urban contexts of inequalities?
- How can conceptions of speed – immanent, constant, acceleration, urgency, gradual – be used to contest the politics of short-termism and ideology of inevitability experienced under neoliberal conditions?
- How might the implication of speed be used to explore conditions of difference, specificity and multiplicity in contemporary cities?
- What implications might the use of speed of change imply in a world that is increasingly divided by political conditions of social, economic and spatial inequalities?
Instructions for Authors
Please submit titles and abstracts of no more than 300 words to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by Sunday 4 March.
Call For Papers Deadline
04-Mar-2018
