Call for Papers
Urban forms in the Global South: The state, the city and the production of social difference
AAG Annual Meeting in Boston, April 5-9, 2017
Co-Organizers: Caitlin Ryan (University of Colorado at Boulder) and Yang Yang (University of Colorado at Boulder)
Chair: Dr. Jennifer Fluri (University of Colorado at Boulder)
Discussant: Dr. Sarah Moser (McGill University)
Sponsored by: Urban Geography, Development Geographies, and Cultural Geography Specialty Groups
Deadline for Papers/Panel Proposals: October 24, 2017
In the last decade scholars working in critical urban studies have made sustained calls for a re-evaluation of the field’s theoretical, epistemological and even ontological premises. These range from calls for a consideration of “ordinary cities” (Robinson 2006) over “global cities” (Sassen 2001) to a grand theory of “planetary urbanization” (Brenner 2009); from understanding how new forms of neoliberal governmentality and the “new urban politics” operate (Ong 2006; Chatterjee 2011), to thinking about “worlding” and “assembling” practices (Roy and Ong 2011; McCann, Roy, and Ward 2013). The field is now involved in a deep and rich set of debates drawing on the experiences of cities beyond Europe and North America that call for decolonizing, provincializing and pluralizing urban theory(s) (Derickson 2015; Roy 2016; Sheppard, Leitner, and Maringanti 2013).
Within this fray, feminist geographers are particularly concerned with the way that forms of social difference (geographical, gendered, class, racial, ethnic, religious, aged, etc.) are caught up in processes of urban development in the global south. Differences are (re)inscribed in the material world through specific technologies of neoliberal urban governance, but national and transnational circulations of bodies and ideas are also at work in the making of the urban (Peake and Rieker 2013). The everyday lives and livelihoods of today’s urban populations transcend a single place, whether physically or virtually. At the same time, urban experiences are conditioned upon one’s relationship to the vectors of possibility that intersect in city space, what Massey (1991) calls “power geometry.” Finally, the scale of the urban, it is now frequently argued, has displaced the scale of the nation-state in terms of the importance for producing subjectivities and identities (Marston 2000; Brenner 2004). If the nation-state is the scale of the imagined, produced by statecraft and elite actors, the urban is the scale of experience and everyday life.
This panel seeks to build on these insights about the relationships between social difference/subjectivity, state making and urbanization in the global south. To paraphrase a question raised by Buckley (2014) and amplified by Derickson (2015), we ask: How does a focus on the politics of difference illuminate the ways by which the production of the built environment depends on parallel productions of inequality and difference?
Case studies and grounded work are particularly welcome.
Please email paper title and abstract (250 words) to session organizers by Friday, October 20: [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] Authors must also register for the conference and submit their abstracts through the AAG website by the October 27 deadline in order to be added to the paper session.
Works cited:
Brenner, Neil. 2004. New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2009. “What Is Critical Urban Theory?” City 13 (2-3): 198–207.
Buckley, Michelle. 2014. “On the Work of Urbanization: Migration, Construction Labor, and the Commodity Moment.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (2): 338–47.
Chatterjee, Ipsita. 2011. “Governance as ‘Performed’, Governance as ‘Inscribed’ New Urban Politics in Ahmedabad.” Urban Studies 48 (12): 2571–90.
Derickson, Kate D. 2015. “Urban Geography I Locating Urban Theory in the ‘urban Age.’” Progress in Human Geography 39 (5): 647–57.
Marston, Sallie A. 2000. “The Social Construction of Scale.” Progress in Human Geography 24 (2): 219–42.
Massey, Doreen. 1991. “A Global Sense of Place.” Marxism Today 35 (6): 24–29.
McCann, Eugene, Ananya Roy, and Kevin Ward. 2013. “Assembling/Worlding Cities.” Urban Geography 34 (5): 581–89.
Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.
Peake, Linda, and Martina Rieker, eds. 2013. Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Robinson, Jennifer. 2006. Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. Questioning Cities Series. London ; New York: Routledge.
Roy, Ananya. 2016. “What Is Urban about Critical Urban Theory?” Urban Geography 37 (6): 810–23.
Roy, Ananya, and Aihwa Ong, eds. 2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Studies in Urban and Social Change. Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2 edition. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Sheppard, Eric, Helga Leitner, and Anant Maringanti. 2013. “Provincializing Global Urbanism: A Manifesto.” Urban Geography 34 (7): 893–900.
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