Dear colleagues,
please find attached the CfP for our proposed session "Urban Utopias and Heterotopias" at the AAG 2013 in Los Angeles.
Any kind of papers dealing with Foucault and/or Lefebvre in the widest sense are welcome, contact one of us for further inquiries or paper proposals (emails below)
Thomas Doerfler, Christina West
Urban utopias and heterotopias: Theorizing, analyzing, and evaluating urban
spaces (Session)
Many recent discourses in urban research focus on »urbanity« or on the production of »the urban« as a negotiation process between urban planning, private investors and developers, frequently referring to newly developed »urbanities« or reformulated urbanspaces. At the same time, other stakeholders conceive urbanity beyond neoliberal reasoning and claim a »right to the city«: new forms of urban resistance seem to change the concepts of urbanity, but it is mainly unknown how they operate in time and space and on what kind of tactics and strategies they rely on.
This complexity of society with its power relations and strong linkages to the physical and material space is drawn up by Lefebvre's comprehensive work. He conceptualizes the urban as an »oeuvre«, as an expression of human creativity. The urban appears in his philosophy of practice as an experimental utopia, a scenario for the situation right now and here, but also yet to come and especially open-ended. His concept can be contrasted to Foucault's dispositif as a relation of power, knowledge and space, without strong notions on materiality, albeit they are conceivable in his works. Particularly his fragmental thoughts about 'Heterotopias' as localized utopias open up discoursive ties.
Our session seeks to link these concepts to the discussion on 'The Urban' for a better understanding of urban phenomena at a both theoretical and empirical level. The approaches of Lefebvre und Foucault to utopias and heterotopias not only promise a description of the processes of production of space within different functional systems and power groups, but also to elucidate how individual and collective comprehensions of social and spatial interrelations are created. We would like to discuss the capabilities of these concepts for an analysis of the relation of social discourses and materiality as well as of different types of power in negotiation processes, and thus for an identification of new forms of urban governances and performances.
Chairs:
Christina West, Chair of Economic Geography, University of Mannheim, Germany,
west[at]uni-mannheim.de
Thomas Doerfler, Institute of Sociology, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany thomas.doerfler[at]sowi.uni-goettingen.de
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