RC21 CONFERENCE 2013
Resourceful cities
Berlin (Germany), 29-31 August 2013
Humboldt-University Berlin, Institute for Social Science, Dept. for Urban and Regional Sociology
Suburbs and boundaries: the continued push for peripheral expansion
This session seeks paper submissions that deal with the issue of suburban and exurban expansion. Its focus is on how these urban extensions (that come in a large variety of forms across the globe) create new boundary situations. Classically this topic has been dealt with in research on the city and the countryside. We know this particular boundary is now largely obsolete in a fully urbanized world. These boundaries can now be understood in physical, material, ecological, social, territorial and other ways but they are not necessarily firm and defined. Obviously, given the location of this conference, there is a reference here to Berlin's past (and perhaps present) but also possible other metaphors/realities of boundaries. This may include papers on walls, gates, shrinkage, greenbelts and growth boundaries. It may also include a focus on new forms of social segregation in suburban environments. We explicitly invite papers that explode the traditional north-south divide on matters of suburban research. We have a particular interest here to contribute to a more general understanding of global suburbanisms. We also hope to elicit papers that take seriously the primary theme of the conference on the resourcefulness of cities. While we understand the boundaries we invoke to be problematic, we also see in them the potential for the protection of socio-ecological metabolisms, the emergence of ethnoburban experiences, novel “in-between” and “postsuburban” built forms, and new modalities of political and governance experimentation.
Session Organizers
Prof. Roger Keil, The City Institute at York University, Toronto, E: rkeil@yorku.ca
Prof. Alan Mabin, School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, E: Johannesburg Alan.Mabin@wits.ac.za
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