Call for Papers: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London, 28-30 August 2019
Abstract submission deadline 12th Feb
Urban limits: peri-urban transformations in the Global South
Organisers
Tom Cowan, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen,
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Claire Mercer, Department of Geography and Environment, LSE,
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Session abstract
This session explores social and spatial transformations in peri-urban areas of the Global South, with a focus on the roles which decidedly ‘non-urban’ actors, infrastructures and processes play in shaping heterogeneous urban landscapes.
While urban studies has long drawn insights from the great metropoles, there is now a burgeoning body of work drawing analytical insights from peri-urban areas in the Global South posing questions for orthodox understandings of urbanisation. The peri-urban,
caught between agrarian and urban modes of production and at the interface of rural and urban governance, serves as an often ambiguous, yet generative site for the working out of state development agendas, expanding property markets, infrastructural development,
and new class compositions.
This session will build on recent analytical insights into suburban ‘boundary work’ (Mercer forthcoming, Ortega 2018); peripheral autoconstructions (Caldeira 2017) and peri-urban infrastructures (Gidwani and Maringanti 2016) to explore
the peri-urban both as a set of peripheral physical locations and as a relational lens for uncovering processes of boundary-drawing and boundary-crossing which constitute uneven urban landscapes and social hierarchies. In rethinking the ‘peri-urban’ we seek
to draw attention to the ongoing articulations of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’, periphery and centre which must be put to work at various sites and scales, to produce contemporary urban landscapes and subjects.
In doing so, in the session we seek to bring together work on peri-urbanisation in geography, critical urban studies, agrarian studies, area studies and anthropology to advance debates on the relational geographies, subjects and processes
of urban limits; exploring how the contemporary urban is made and unmade through the complex relations which take place at its limits, and how a focus on these limits might help us rethink orthodoxies in ‘urban theory’.
With a particular focus on thinking through grounded empirical research, the session aims to focus on both socio-spatial infrastructures (labour geographies, political ecologies, planning technologies, governance, class compositions) of
the peri-urban and how such infrastructures constitute particular configurations of the contemporary urban.
Possible contributions may include (although are not exhaustive of):
• Geographies and infrastructures of rural-urban migration and mobility
• Peri-urban land governance
• Autoconstructions and peri-urban informality
• Peri-urban planning technologies and infrastructural development
• Urban theory and its constitutive outsides
Please send 200 word abstracts to
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Works cited
Caldeira, T. (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.
Gidwani, V., & Maringanti, A. (2016) ‘The waste-value dialectic: Lumpen urbanization in contemporary India’,
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 36(1), 112-133.
Mercer, C. (forthcoming) ‘Boundary work: becoming middle class in suburban Dar es Salaam’,
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Ortega, A.A.C. (2018) ‘Transnational suburbia: spatialities of gated suburbs and Filipino diaspora in Manila’s periurban fringe’,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 108, 1, 106-124.
Claire Mercer
Professor of Human Geography
Department of Geography and Environment
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London
WC2A 2AE
Tel: 0207 107 5352
https://twitter.com/clairecmercer
https://twitter.com/LSEGeogUPD
http://www.lse.ac.uk/geography-and-environment/people/academic-staff/claire-mercer/claire-mercer