Happy New Year!
CFP for Paper Session in the RGS-IBG 2014 Annual Conference, London, UK
Ordinary Cities #FAIL
Organizer: Richard G. Smith (Swansea University, UK)
A fashionable theme trending in urban studies over the past decade has been the notion that all cities are ordinary. However, it is only now that the ordinary cities supposition has begun to attract critical scrutiny. Be it throwaway comments about the notion, “I think it unfortunate that the adjective ordinary should be applied to any city” (Peter Taylor, 2013), dismissals of the ordinary cities agenda in toto as merely ‘gestural’ (Allen Scott and Michael Storper, forthcoming), or exposures of the multitude of errors and misrepresentations that litter and invalidate the writings of ordinary cities advocates (Richard G. Smith, 2013a, 2013b), much needed critical readings of the ordinary cities literature are now beginning to emerge. This session invites contributions that critically examine the ordinary cities literature, be it to expose its errors, flaws, fallacies, failures, misrepresentations, exaggerations, caricatures, paradoxes and myths; or to delimit it through detailing its weaknesses, limitations, boundaries, blind spots, and traps.
Contributions could consider, but are by no means limited to, many issues:
• The oversimplification of extant urban theory/studies across the writings of ordinary cities proponents
• The ordinary cities idea as a fallacy of distraction
• Erroneous and superficial readings of extant urban theory by ordinary cities advocates
• The trap of incommensurability and the prison of comparative urbanism
• The limitations of comparative urbanism as an a posteriori approach
• The consequentialism of the ordinary cities belief
• The risk of essentialism in concepts such as ‘emplaced heterogeneity’
• The idiographic and nominalist limitations of the ordinary cities gesture
• The ordinary cities attitude as a provincial particularism
• The veiling of the vast asymmetries of power and influence between cities in the writings of the ordinary cities movement
• The failure of ordinary cities scholars to evidence ethnocentrism in contemporary urban studies
• The flawed critiques ordinary cities advocates have launched against the neo-Marxist world city and global city concepts
• The failure of the ordinary cities approach to engage with Wallerstein’s world systems analysis
• The contradictions between postcolonial theory and the ordinary cities approach
• The discontinuities between extant postcolonial urbanism and the ordinary cities postcolonial approach
• The exclusions behind calls from ordinary cities champions for a ‘more inclusive’ global urban studies
• Challenging the ordinary cities myth that cities from the so-called ‘global South’ have been neglected in urban studies
• Ordinary cities advocates confusion of neo-Marxism with developmentalism and neoliberalism
Etc.
Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words by February 28th to [log in to unmask]
Annual International Conference 2014: http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+international+conference.htm
References
Allen J. Scott and Michael Storper (in press) ‘The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
Richard G. Smith (2013a) ‘The ordinary city trap’, Environment and Planning A doi:10.1068/a45516
Richard G. Smith (2013b) ‘The ordinary city trap snaps back’, Environment and Planning A doi:10.1068/a46284
Peter J. Taylor (2013) Extraordinary cities (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham)
Dr Richard G. Smith
Department of Geography
College of Science
Swansea University
Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK
Tel. +44(0)1792 602558
Fax +44(0)1792 295955
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/science/geography/r.g.smith/
A few recent publications:
Smith RG (2013) “Baudrillard, Jean”, in McGee RJ & Warms RL eds. Encyclopedia of Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Sage, London), 62–64
Smith RG (2013) “City”, in Armitage J ed. The Virilio Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press), pp. 50–53
Smith RG (2011) “Poststructuralism”, in Sim S ed. The Lyotard Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press), pp. 190–2
Smith RG (2011) “NY-LON”, in International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities edited by Derudder B, Hoyler M, Taylor PJ & Witlox F (Edward Elgar), pp. 720–32
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