RC21 CONFERENCE 2013
Resourceful cities
Berlin (Germany), 29-31 August 2013
Humboldt-University Berlin, Institute for Social Science, Dept. for Urban and Regional Sociology
Understanding the politics of urban massification
This session addresses ‘inter-urban inequalities’ and takes as its starting point the mounting empirical evidence that inter-urban, as well as more general socio-economic equalities are growing within the majority of nations of the Global North and Global South. However it questions whether the ‘explanations’ for growing inter-urban disparities that have dominated social science literatures in recent years, loosely grouped around the ‘New Economy Geography’ in economics and the ‘state rescaling’ literature, largely within geography, are adequate, particularly in terms of the methodologies they deploy and the forms of evidence they mobilise. This, it can be argued, leads them to offer over-determined accounts of what drives spatial economic differentiation and the extent to which its ostensible causes are inevitable, desirable and/or ‘steerable’. On one hand, the state rescaling literature tends to over-estimate the impact of changes in public policies, governance arrangements and regulatory regimes (and to oversimplify their multifarious forms under the crude banner of ‘neoliberalisation’). On the other, a new generation of spatial economists sets great analytical store by ‘new’ agglomeration forces and tends to over-emphasise the ostensible perversity of policies that attempt to ‘buck the market’. What is needed, in order to promote greater interdisciplinary dialogue and encourage less polarised debate about ‘what can be done?’, is more careful, empirical work on what could be called urban ‘massification’, that is, the complex interactions between real agents – investors, regulators, ‘producers’, ‘consumers’, citizens -which combine to encourage intra- and international flows of finance, innovative ideas and (skilled) people into some metropolitan areas and not others. Proposals for papers that deal with the methodological challenges of studying massification processes and/or present empirical, case study analyses of the politics of urban asset development are therefore welcomed.
Session Organizer
Prof. Alan Harding, Professor of Public Policy, University of Liverpool Management School, T: +44 (0)151 795 2479, +44 (0)7789 981760, E: alan.harding@liverpool.ac.uk
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