 |
 |
Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers 3-7 April 2019, Washington DC Call for papers: *Metropolis (Un)bounded: Infrastructural Inter-dependencies, Instabilities and Inequalities in Metropolitan Regions* Organizers: Nathan Marom (The Inter Disciplinary Center Herzliya) and Oren Shlomo (IDC Herzliya; The Open University of Israel) Session sponsored by the Urban Geography Specialty Group In recent years, there has been a profusion of critical perspectives on urban infrastructure, often within the broader framework of urban political ecology (UPE). Such studies have been valuable for the insights they provide into the politics and governance of infrastructural systems – focusing on water, sewage, waste, power, communication, transportation etc. However, usually these infrastructures are studied separately as “sectors” or distinct networks, albeit embedded in an urban whole. In this session, we seek to push the critical study of infrastructure forward by focusing on the interrelations between different infrastructure networks and how they converge to produce the spatialities and inequalities of metropolitan regions. In other words, we seek to discuss how large-scale infrastructural systems are often bound together and affect each other in unexpected ways – be it synergetic effects, functional interdependency, or cascading failures and collapse. At the same time, we also need to pay attention to the various political, social and ecological affects and exchanges that interrelated infrastructures produce across institutions, policies, communities and spaces. Moreover, we suggest that this infrastructural “boundedness” should be studied in the context and scale of metropolitan regions, since they rely on proper infrastructure interactions to insure synchronization, security and efficiency of a wide range of resources and services delivery across and between localities. In fact, the idea of “urban metabolism”, which is central to UPE, receives its full significance as “metropolitan metabolism”, because the give and take between the urban and the natural is spatialized across extended regions and significant distances. On this scale, dimensions of unevenness in provision and management of infrastructure also become more apparent, for example between urban and peri-urban areas. Thus, the panel intends both to expand and open the infrastructure debates to the metropolitan scale, as well as to contribute to the theoretical discussions on the construction of metropolitan governance, spatiality, sustainability, inequality and resilience through the lens of the politics and governance of infrastructure. We are looking for papers that address manifold interrelations between different infrastructural systems at the metropolitan scale. We welcome an emphasis on the instabilities and dependencies that characterize infrastructural convergences, and the inequalities that they often generate within different areas or communities in metropolitan regions. Topics can engage with (but are not limited to) the following themes: · Interdependence of specific infrastructural systems (e.g. between water supply, drainage and sewage, or between power grids, transportation and communication) · The relationships between “gray” and “green” infrastructures (e.g. highways and restored rivers) · Infrastructural inequalities within urban areas, and between urban and peri-urban areas · Infrastructure interfaces and corridors and their effects on vulnerable communities · The impacts of infrastructural interdependencies and instabilities on sustainability and resilience · Synergies versus instabilities in infrastructure interdependences · Infrastructural interdependencies and agglomerated or extended urbanization · Case studies of single metrooplitan regions, or comparisons between regions · Case studies from both the global North and South. Please send an abstract (max 300 word) by October 14, 2018 to Oren Shlomo [log in to unmask] ; and Nathan Marom [log in to unmask] Authors will be notified by October 21 if they are selected for the session and should complete the abstract submission and conference registration process with the AAG before the deadline of October 25, 2018. -- *Oren Shlomo, PhD* Postdoctoral Fellow ; School of Sustainability, IDC Herzliya, Teaching Fellow; The Open University of Israel https://openu.academia.edu/OrenShlomo ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CRIT-GEOG-FORUM list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CRIT-GEOG-FORUM&A=1