AAG Los Angeles: Call for abstracts
Abstracts are invited for the following paper session(s):
“Governing Los Angeles and beyond.” Organizers Andy Jonas (Hull, UK), Mark
Purcell (University of Washington), Roger Keil (York University). Sponsored
by the AAG Urban and Political Speciality Groups
Despite a considerable outpouring of research and critical commentary on
Los Angeles in recent years, surprisingly little attention has been paid to
processes and politics of governance in the city and its wider region.
Nevertheless, it is often claimed that Los Angeles remains one of the
most ‘unplanned’ and ‘ungoverned’ city-regions in the US. Yet such claims
have yet to be subjected to sustained critical theoretical or empirical
scrutiny and, in the absence of comparisons with other urban and regional
contexts, are increasingly difficult to justify. The current period of
capitalist development has been characterized as one of ‘regulatory
transition/policy experimentation,’ with a particular emphasis on
institution building at the urban and regional scales. As a paradigm of
contemporary urbanization, Los Angeles should exhibit governance dilemmas
typical of city-regions in the throes of regulatory/political change. The
aims of these sessions is to examine the extent to which Los Angeles and
the city-region stands out as an example of contemporary ‘governance
failure’ and to situate the Los Angeles experience in the wider context of
political and institutional developments in other urban and regional
contexts. The sessions will highlight different aspects of contemporary
city-region politics and governance, such as economic development,
planning, the environment, citizenship, community politics, welfare,
and ‘race,’ gender, and ethnicity.
Please send paper title and draft abstract (no more than 250 words) to Mark
Purcell at [log in to unmask] by July 25.
For more details on the conference, visit the AAG website at
http://www.aag.org.
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