 |
 |
Please note there was an error in the last text (my email was miss-spelt) - now re-sending (please use this version to forward on) Sam Call for papers: The Politics of the Neighbourhood: perspectives from Latin America and beyond Tuesday 16th October 2018, 10:00am A workshop hosted by the City Centre, Queen Mary University of London with Latin American Geographies UK (LAG-UK) The neighbourhood is a crucial arena for political life in the city. More than just a register of local experience or a bounded space on a city map, the neighbourhood is a key means through which systems of government, planning, infrastructure, housing and multiple uses of everyday space are organised. Neighbourhoods are thus arenas for the consolidation of power, as well as privileged sites of mobilisation for social change. A range of actors, including social movements, political parties, government representatives, NGOs and other civil society organisations call upon the neighbourhood in response to inequalities, injustices and unchecked socio-economic transformations. And yet, despite the significance of the neighbourhood for urban politics, there have been relatively few scholarly efforts to provide a conceptual or empirical overview. Latin American cities have much to offer in considering the politics of the neighbourhood. In the 1980s, the neighbourhood emerged as key spatial protagonist of socio-political transformation in the dual context of the return to democracy and the post-industrial shift to neoliberalism. As activists in Buenos Aires proclaimed: ‘the new factory is the neighbourhood’, with all the political and economic consequences that such a shift incurs. The 1990s saw much experimentation in new political designs implemented at a neighbourhood level, from the participatory budgeting of Montevideo and Porto Alegre, to the radically decentralised governance of Lima. More recent times have been marked by immense challenges for the politics of the neighbourhood, perhaps most visibly in the drastic inequalities between the ever-growing gated communities and the sprawling urban slums. Conceptions of neighbourhood have also been appropriated in neoliberal urban discourse and practice. In this context, a one-day workshop at QMUL will explore key contours for making sense of neighbourhood politics. The particular focus will be on Latin American experiences, but contributions from cities elsewhere are invited with the aim of opening dialogue across urban environments. We are interested in both conceptual and empirical engagement with the neighbourhood, with questions to be explored including but not constrained to: - In what ways has the neighbourhood, as locus of urban experience, identity and social organisation endured or been transformed within contemporary cities? What are some of the geographical and historical challenges of researching the neighbourhood? - What’s at stake in registering urban politics at the scale of the neighbourhood? What can a neighbourhood politics agenda achieve and what risks being left out? - In what ways do Latin American neighbourhood politics speak to experiences elsewhere? To participate, please send an abstract (250 words max) to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> and [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> by September 16th. Anyone wanting to join but not present a paper should also send an email registering interest. ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the PYGYWG list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=PYGYWG&A=1