Dear all,
Apologies for cross-posting ...
Annual Association of American Geographers Conference, Las Vegas, 22-27
March 2009
Paper session: The making of urban fringe economies
Organizers: Kevin Ward (Geography, School of Environment and Development,
University of Manchester, UK) and David Wilson (Geography, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
Over the last thirty years fringe and shadow economies have grown rapidly in
some of the poorest urban neighbourhoods of the industrialized world. A stroll
around many of the US’s and the UK’s inner cities reveals a proliferation of its
leading edges -- check cashers, pawnbrokers, payday lenders, rent-to-own
stores, social service organisations, and temp staffing companies -- acting
as ‘boundary institutions’ to financial and labour markets. They now dominate
these urban landscapes as they produce spaces of predation, offering shoddy
and overpriced goods and services, trapping workers in low-pay jobs, and
exacerbating poverty and deprivation of struggling people. As a subset of neo-
liberal economies, they are now generally sanctioned and accepted amalgams
that are bolstered by prevailing norms, values, sentiments, and legal codes. In
this context, they constitute an institutional infrastructure that shapes the
way in which contemporary urban landscapes of dystopia and exclusion come
to exist in the way that they do. The firms in these industries have served to
enforce and deepen the systemically uneven features of capitalism while they
have experienced high rates of growth that has allowed them to open new
stores in more and more low-income communities. Yet, despite their presence
in the life of a growing number of citizens very little is known about them. This
session welcomes papers that contribute to a fuller understanding of these
issues.
Authors are invited to submit a brief abstract (not more than 250 words) to
the session organizers Kevin Ward ([log in to unmask]) and David
Wilson ([log in to unmask]) by Friday October 3rd at the latest.
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