Apologies for cross-posting...
RGS-IBG 2010 second CFP: The New Politics of 'Sustainable' Urban
Infrastructure
Around the world a wide variety of actors - public and private,
experts and non-experts - are working together to transform various
'infrastructures'. From communities regenerating coastal walkways in
India to guerilla energy grids in the Scottish Highlands, people are
engaging with infrastructure in new ways. These efforts are
increasingly framed by the rhetoric of community 'resilience' to
climate change, or by the promotion of ecological services to augment
anthropogenic infrastructure. But alongside these dominant policy
discourses, the demand for new infrastructure is challenging existing
social and political institutions. It requires new forms of 'public'
engagement, new actors, and new political agendas.
Coalitions of actors are reconstructing natures and infrastructures
from the bottom up, through initiatives like the Transition movement,
opening up new spaces for political engagement with the urban
transformation. At the same time, authorities are increasingly
willing to experiment with sustainable technologies and alternative
planning approaches that 'let a thousand flowers bloom', transforming
cities into living laboratories for the study of sustainability. The
construction of high profile eco-cities, towns and suburbs-and their
various accoutrements---around the world is simply the most visible
aspect of a veritable proliferation of experiments in sustainable
building and landscape design that is being driven by the increasing
urbanization of the global population.
This session explores the conceptual and empirical dimensions of these
emerging engagements with urban infrastructures and their social and
political implications. We are interested in papers that address both
formal and informal examples, and the intersection between the two.
This session seeks to engage some of the following key questions:
* What new coalitions of actors are emerging to engage with urban
infrastructures?
* How are infrastructural knowledges produced and used?
* Are grassroots movements like Transition Towns and climate change
communities opening up new spaces of engagement with urban
transformation?
* How do grass-roots movements intersect with the government and
manage the challenges of co-operating with the authorities without
being co-opted?
* How does local knowledge or 'placed knowledge' influence
opportunities and reforms?
* Does engagement with urban infrastructure transform relations to
nature and the city, and notions of (ecological) citizenship?
* What is the political status of these engagements with urban infrastructure?
* What are the dimensions of the city as 'laboratory'? Is it useful to
talk about different types of urban 'experiments'? How does this
affect the framing of sustainability?
* How do exemplary projects inform new urban infrastructure experiments?
* What are the implications for urban institutions?
* How do cities transfer knowledge across their political borders?
Expressions of interest to Rob Krueger ([log in to unmask]) or James
Evans ([log in to unmask] ) by 10 Feb 2010.
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James Evans
Director MSc Environmental Governance
School of Environment and Development
University of Manchester
ph. +44(0)161 306 6680
MSc Environmental Governance
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/geography/postgraduate/taught/courses/eg/
Rescue Geography: developing methods for public geographers
http://www.gees.bham.ac.uk/research/cpp/rescuegeography/index.htm
Society and Environment Research Group, University of Manchester
http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/SERG.htm
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