We are happy to announce that we organize three Panels at the ESA Midterm conference hosted by the Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Research.
Panel 5: Beyond the public/civic divide? How PCPs transform urban actors
In this panel, we invite contributions focusing not only on the factors contributing to the formation of PCPs, but most importantly on their performative, transformative effects upon the actors involved. How are their practices, knowledge, public discourses and modes of organization being transformed in multifarious ways – precisely by partaking in PCPs and reacting to the specific challenges and opportunities emerging through such cooperation?
Some relevant questions are:
- How do the actors involved try to model, analyze and understand themselves?
- How are “the state” and “the civil society” performed, imagined and mapped by the actors
involved in PCPs? - In which ways are social movements partaking in PCPs experiencing processes of
professionalization, institutionalization and diversification? - In which ways are state institutions transformed by the cooperation and what are
hindrances in this transformation? - How is seeing like a city being challenged by PCPs?
Panel 18: Seeing the City through multispecies perspectives: Mobilizing nature to the city and the city to beyond
Building on sociological and interdisciplinary concepts of the city as a more-than-human realm (Franklyn, 2017), the panel explores what happens when non-human beings, plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, and so on, are taken seriously as political elements inhabiting and co-producing urban spaces and formations. It focuses on two regards: (i) how encounters and assemblages between human and non-human worlds socially construct the city and are in tension with different urbanism practices, and (ii) the ontological, ethical, and political conditions of those non-human agents in making ‘the urban’.
Panel 20: Seeing like a Smart City-Maker: Reimagining Cities through Instruments and Practices
Citizen science, innovation hackathons, and the politicisation of urban infrastructures are forcing city administrations to embrace new forms of smartness while also contending with operationalisation issues. The panel will examine the tools, formats, and practices that seek to transform cities into “Smart Cities.” The question at stake is how “Smart City” projects practically converge the vision on the ground.
Bringing together discussions on “studies of digitisation” and “critical smart urbanisms”, contributions may address (the politics of) performative planning, administrational politics, and related discourses. Contributions that highlight tools of intervention and unconventional policy instruments, as well as efforts that emphasise “digitisation tactics” from within governmental planning, administration, and strategy-making processes, are especially welcomed.
Here you find the Call for Abstracts (Deadline 6.5.22)
Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Research. Unter den Linden 6, Berlin