RC21 CONFERENCE 2013
Resourceful cities
Berlin (Germany), 29-31 August 2013
Humboldt-University Berlin, Institute for Social Science, Dept. for Urban and Regional Sociology
Urbanism beyond the West: Comparing Accelerated Urban Change in Eastern Europe and the Global South
In the search for new models of urbanism, attention is now being shifted towards non‐Western cities. Yet the urban dynamics of post‐socialist Eastern Europe are largely disregarded in the recent literature on global urbanism with its focus on the North‐South axis. Although the cities of Eastern Europe and the Global South have been theorized as radically different, the former being described as “under‐urbanized” and the latter as “over‐urbanized”, we propose to include Eastern Europe in what Ananya Roy calls “new geographies of theory”. In cities of both regions the intense socio‐material transformations of recent years have been highly uneven, normatively guided by foreign aid programs and neoliberal policy agendas. In both cases we can also observe new forms of “insurgent” or “messy” urbanism emerging in reaction to new inequalities and arbitrary politics. Despite substantial (i.e. infrastructural) differences, we claim that comparing cities of Eastern Europe and the Global South may both re‐open the regionally biased debate on the “post‐socialist city” and contribute to the broader discussion on global and comparative urbanism. This session invites contributions comparing major phenomena of urban change in both regions as well as papers theorizing the post‐socialist city in global terms. Following the question of how patterns emerging from accelerated urban change can be treated as resources for new models of urbanism, we suggest the following topics:
- new inequalities and new solidarities
- accelerated socio‐material change as a challenge for sustainable urban policy
- reshaping relations of property and new property forms
- changing urban form and infrastructures of daily life
- foreign policy aid and its discontents
- urban informality and marginality
- ethnographies of urban society between neoliberal dreams and dystopian reality
- the notion of “chaos” and its use in the global urbanism debate
Session Organizers
Dr. Monika Grubbauer, Darmstadt University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and Center of Research Excellence URBAN RESEARCH, Postal address: TU Darmstadt, El‐Lissitzky‐Str. 1, 64287 Darmstadt (Germany), E: grubbauer@stadtforschung.tu‐darmstadt.de
Joanna Kusiak, MA, University of Warsaw, Institute of Sociology, Postal address: ul. Madalińskiego 23a/60, 00‐513 Warszawa (Poland), E: jkkusiak@gmail.com
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