CFP: Doing Global Urban Research

Please find below a call for papers for the Urban Studies Foundation sponsored international conference “Doing Global Urban Research”, which will take place at Loughborough University, UK, from Monday 7 September to Wednesday 9 September 2015.

Thanks to the generous support of their sponsors, Loughborough University is able to offer free registration, accommodation and subsistence – and for some a significant subsidy on travel costs – for 45 participants. They therefore invite interested colleagues to read the following call for papers and to submit proposals.

THE THEME
Irrespective of whether you are an urban geographer, urban sociologist, urban political scientist, urban historian, urban economist, favouring a qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods approach, the challenge that confronts researchers attempting to participate in and engage with our increasingly ‘globalised’ urban studies remains fundamentally the same – how to make sense of global urban complexity.

In the quest to make sense of urban complexity, urban scholars are leaving no stone unturned in the pursuit of new theory production. The aim of this conference is to examine the current state of empirical research (and the methodological approaches we possess) for conceptualising global urban complexity – or as we are putting it, Doing Global Urban Research.

For more a detailed overview of the conference theme please visit http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/projects/projec100.html

THE AIMS & OBJECTIVES
The aim of the conference is to confront the research challenges presented by new geographies of urban theory.

The conference has 4 objectives:

• To provide a platform to showcase the best examples of theoretically-informed, empirically-grounded, policy-relevant research in global urban studies.
• To provide a forum to confront the research challenges and opportunities presented by new geographies of urban theory.
• To consider the methodological/empirical responses to new geographies of urban theory.
• To establish the near-future priorities for researchers doing global urban studies.

THE EVENT
In a break from traditional conferences the programme includes time for intensive debate and moderated workshops/panels to outline near-future research priorities and possible collaborations. 50 papers will be presented over 3 days, comprising 3 plenary sessions (with 5 invited keynote speakers), 5 sets of parallel workshop sessions (with 40 minutes per paper), and two specially convened panel sessions.

THE KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
We are delighted to confirm our 5 keynote speakers:

• Professor Roger Keil, York University, Director of ‘Global Suburbanisms’ project
• Professor Susan Parnell, University of Cape Town, African Centre for Cities
• Professor Christian Schmid, ETH Zurich, Future Cities Laboratory
• Professor Peter J Taylor, Northumbria University, Director of GaWC
• Professor Kevin Ward, University of Manchester, Director of cities@manchester

THE REGISTRATION PROCESS

45 places are available. If you would like to present we invite you to submit a proposal to the organisers, John Harrison (J.Harrison4@lboro.ac.uk) and Michael Hoyler (M.Hoyler@lboro.ac.uk), by Friday 12 December 2014. (Further contact info below)

Your proposal should be no more than one side of A4 and include the following information: name(s) (clearly identifying the named presenter), affiliation and e-mail address, title of contribution, details of contribution (including the methodological/empirical contribution) and up to 6 keywords.

Contributors will be selected to attend based on the quality of their research and its direct relevance to the conference theme. Our aim is to bring together researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds who share common ground through their interest in global urban research. This includes those at the ‘centre’ of recent debates, emergent voices, as well as engaged critics.
Decisions on proposals will be made during January 2015.

THE COSTS
Thanks to the generous support of the Urban Studies Foundation there will be no registration fee. Hotel accommodation (two nights), food (breakfast, lunch, morning and afternoon breaks), drinks reception and conference dinner are also included for each named presenter. We will also be able to provide travel bursaries to support some speakers, with preference given to those coming from the Global South, Central & Eastern Europe and/or early career researchers.


THE OUTPUTS
Our plan is to showcase some of the best examples of theoretically-informed, empirically-grounded, policy-relevant research in global urban studies presented at the conference through publication of a special issue and an edited book.


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Michael Hoyler
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography
Associate Director, Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network
Department of Geography
Loughborough University
Loughborough LE11 3TU
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1509 222740

Fax: +44 (0)1509 223930

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/

Guest Speaker - University of Greenland

Thank you Adam Grydehoj!  It was a pleasure appearing yesterday at the University of Greenland to discuss democratic forms in Luxembourg and Switzerland with your students of 'Culture and Politics'.

Job Opportunity

Student Assistantship

The SUSTAIN_GOV research team is searching motivated graduate students who will carry out a variety of tasks associated with the project, and who seek to relate the topic of governance and planning to their own research program objectives. In this respect, the research assistant will provide on-going project management support, while at the same time be encouraged to develop a parallel yet complimentary independent research agenda that is directly relevant to their own academic program of study and academic purposes such as Masters Theses, essays, or independent or directed studies.

Job responsibilities include attending team meetings, miscellaneous Office Management, (e.g. web blog management, translations, database management, conference organization), Engaging in research activities associated with SUSTAIN_GOV, developing and carrying out an independent research agenda related to the topic.

Requirements: The candidate must be enrolled as full-time as a Masters student at the University of Luxembourg, be knowledgeable of, or willing to learn, qualitative social scientific research methods (e.g. document search, interviewing, MAXQDA, transcription, coding), and have knowledge of English. Knowledge of German or French is considered an asset. Further, the hired student must provide a mailing address, copy of student card, copy of identity card, copy of Assurance Card (carte sécurité sociale, bleue), and original Tax card (carte d'impôts de la commune) to IPSE Secretariat.

interested applicants should contact me as soon as possible:  constance.carr@uni.lu

Special Issue of Local Environment, "Rescaling Sustainability" is out

The Special Issue of Local Environment, Rescaling Sustainability guest edited by Carr and Affolderbach is in print  vol 19(6)

Official version is available at Taylor and Francis
Author Pre-print available here

Sir Peter Hall (1932-2014)

One of the world’s most famous geographers and planning researchers, and one of the greatest representatives of our discipline in recent generations passed away last week. It is with sadness and regret that we recall his person, his career, and his enormous outputs in the domains of urban and regional development and planning in general terms, and in various fields of specific application such as urban project development, high speed rail infrastructure, and new technologies.

The sheer volume of books, scientific papers, memos, articles and reports that he published is staggering, and the same can be said about the originality and quality of his work. One can trace his major lifetime events and achievements on the Web. On 31st July, in the Guardian published an obituary, and more importantly  and earlier in the year, a lengthy report on British planning issues. Also, both the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and the Bartlett School of Planning at University College, London (with which Sir Peter was last affiliated) published personal tributes. What seems most notable to me, and thus what I want to highlight here, are some of the characteristics of this extraordinary individual.

First, it is hard to oversee the extreme broad range of issues that Sir Peter Hall addressed – representing a rare and matchless universal knowledge in geography and planning that has, of late, mostly fallen victim to the imperative of specialization in both academia and in professional realms. Just to name one of his many publications: his (1998) Cities in Civilization is one of the most readable and comprehensive volumes on towns and cities of our time, stretching urban history, contemporary developments, and urban policy and planning issues.

Second, his broad knowledge was always underscored by precise and detailed expertise, which Sir Peter Hall applied to issues as variegated as urban containment, high speed trains, cities and universities, and culture and creativity – just to name a few. His treatise on The World Cities (1966), one of very first studies on this issue, appeared much earlier than the seminal paper by John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff (1982) or Saskia Sassen’s Global City (1991) that supposedly established the related genre. His thoughts on the association between cities and universities, framed against the background of emerging high-tech – or ‘silicon’ – landscapes, also evolved roughly a decade before this topic gained wider attention in the scientific and urban planning communities. Again, the same applies to culture and creativity as means of urban development, which was thoughtfully included in Cities in Civilization a decade before the Floridian orthodoxy on creativity emerged and occupied urban agendas worldwide. And, his work on the link between transport infrastructure and urban-regional development builds a body of essential literature, providing conceptual clarity, empirical richness, and practical applicability in a field of planning that is often determined by positivism.

In this context - and third - Sir Peter Hall was instrumental because his knowledge was fed into the interface of science and policy. He was always simultaneously both a geographer and planner, enriching debates with both independent analytical findings and engaged scholarship, advice and consultancy. Besides serving the professional communities, such as the Town and Country Planning Association or the Regional Studies Association (of which he was a founding member), he also sat on numerous committees and planning boards providing independent and highly useful expertise in decision-making processes. His sympathy for garden cities as a means to provide guidance and control in spatial development was based on thoughtful considerations of the need to steer growth, without neglecting the many pitfalls of the compact city ideal. It was no coincidence that Sir Peter Hall was among those who launched the recent airport debate in London by co-authoring a (2006) paper advocating the retirement of Heathrow for both economic and urban reasons. A somewhat growth-machine approach comes into play when Sir Peter Hall is considered one of the creators of urban enterprise zones in Thatcher Britain – a concept that is highly suspicious of fostering urban neoliberalism. As a planning researcher and teacher, however, he was indeed quite aware of the limitations to planning. As a consequence, he was also rather critical of planning outcomes. In this respect, his (1980) book Great Planning Disasters was iconic, setting the standard for future studies on large-scale urban projects. Always, his work followed the commitment towards improving urban life-worlds, as was also proven by his last (2013) monograph Good Cities, Better Lives.

Comprehensiveness, accuracy, originality, and critical engagement is what characterizes Sir Peter Hall’s professional life. But in addition to remembering him as someone with an outstanding career,  one can also mourn that geography has lost an extraordinary role model that researchers can aspire to. And, given the imperatives of contemporary academia, and the worlds of impact factors, fund raising, and other performance-oriented indicators, one might also lament over whether, and to what extent, such an intellectual trajectory is even possible today.