Call for Papers – Politicizing the fabric of the city: rethinking material politics in urban studies

Alan Wiig and I are organizing a session at the 21st Annual Critical Geography Conference, hosted at Temple University in Philadelphia, 7-9 November 2014. If the following call for papers is of interest, please be in touch!

As our planetary condition is increasingly an urban condition, calls to rethink the ontology of the city are common (Brenner 2013, Merrifield 2014, Scott & Storper 2014). Indeed, references to our urban age have become “an all pervasive metanarrative” analogous to ‘modernization’ in the 1960s or ‘globalization’ in the 1990s (Brenner & Schmid 2014, p 4). Many of these attempts at reframing the definition of the planetary urban condition seek to re-engage with urban materiality, looking towards urban assemblages (McCann & Ward 2011), metabolisms (Heynen et al 2006), or networked ecologies/infrastructures (Graham & Marvin 2001). This work has produced innovative frameworks for re-thinking the territoriality of urban materials: spatial extension/concentration, translocal networking, (un)boundedness, and (non)contiguity. This session asks contributors to not only re-territorialize urban materialities, but also to politicize the ‘fabric’ of urban space: the multiple layers of land use, infrastructure, and technology which are co-present in the built environment (cf. Gandy 2014, McFarlane & Rutherford 2008). In doing so we seek to reframe interpretations of urban inequality. We explore the geographical-historical dimensions of land, infrastructure, and technology with recognition that the ‘mega’ projects and lasting material legacies which characterize the urban built environment are particularly adept at reproducing inequality at broad scales and over long temporal horizons. We seek to build conversations across critical geography paradigms, considering pathways by which political economic logics and drivers are assembled, performed, and reproduced through urban fabrics. We invite papers which explore strategies in pursuit of more progressive cities by engaging the urban fabric. This includes papers which consider topics like, but by no means limited to:

• The impact of translocal assemblages and mobilities on and through urban materialities
• The political economic logics and drivers which assemble/reproduce urban fabrics
• Politics of the more-than-human dimensions of the urban fabric
• Points of engagement between historical materialism of the city and the increasingly complex forms of urban territoriality
• Diverse, ordinary, and comparative geographies of urban fabrics

Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to John Lauermann (jlauermann@clarku.edu) and Alan Wiig (alanwiig@temple.edu) by 3 September 2014. More information about the conference is available at tucriticalgeography.org

Works cited:
Brenner, Neil. (2013). Theses on urbanization. Public Culture, 25(1), 85-114.
Brenner, Neil, & Schmid, Christian. (2014, online early). The ‘Urban Age’ in question. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12115
Gandy, Matthew (2014 forthcoming). The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Graham, Stephen, & Marvin, Simon. (2001). Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. London; New York: Routledge.
Heynen, Nik, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw (eds.) 2006. In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London; New York: Routledge.
McCann, Eugene, & Ward, Kevin (eds) (2011). Mobile urbanism: cities and policymaking in the global age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McFarlane, Colin & Rutherford, Jonathan (2008) Political infrastructures: Governing and experiencing the fabric of the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(2): 363-374.
Merrifield, Andy. (2014) The new urban question. London: Pluto Press.
Scott, Allen J., & Storper, Michael. (2014, online early). The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12134