Birmingham Fellows

A new tranche of Birmingham Fellows is being set up at the University of Birmingham  – these are five year research positions for early career staff with a guaranteed lectureship at the end of it. This years the theme is ‘Critical Urbanism’.   The Fellowships are funded at University level and the competition is fairly intense, including people who are already carrying fellowship grant money.

Interested applicants for the position can look up details here:

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/excellence/fellows/birmingham-fellows.aspx

John Urry (1946-2016)

With regret, we pass on the announcement that British sociologist, Prof. John Urry, passed away last Friday. Colleagues at Lancaster University have informed us that a memorial webpage is in the process of being established, and will be going live shortly http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/john-urry/. You are invited to share your memories of this inspirational and brilliant man.

Update:  Please enjoy, "Moving with John Urry," by Mimi Sheller

Doreen Massey (1944-2016)

It is not only the Open University, Milton Keynes, or the British geographers’ community that mourns the passing of Doreen Massey Friday last week. Her passing is a great loss for the discipline everywhere, as well as for those who are interested and engaged in questions of space, place and territory. Her contribution to and impact on contemporary geographical thought cannot be underestimated, as generations of students, academics and professionals have learned – and will continue to learn -- from her distinguished writings on that subject. We have benefited and gained intellectual insight from many of her writings, such as Space, Place, and Gender (1994), World City (2007) or her brilliantly composed, For Space (2005), a book that was recently featured at our institute’s post-graduate reading seminar. These, among many many more, have taught geographers and social scientists to rethink space and consider differentiated understandings of space in the context of wider spatial scales, flows of various kinds, gender and otherness, and social inequalities. She will be missed.

Those who are interested in learning more about her personality and critical mind may also enjoy reading the blog entry below.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/hilary-wainwright/how-we-will-miss-that-chuckle-my-friend-doreen-massey

Guest Lecture Dr Peter North (U Liverpool) - Dignity and prosperity for the Anthropocene: Towards social and solidarity economies

On Wednesday 9th March
at 12h30-14h,
in the Black Box (MSH),
please join us as the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning welcomes Dr. Peter North from the University of Liverpool, to present "Dignity and prosperity for the Anthropocene: Towards social and solidarity economies"

AbstractFor some, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was ‘the end of history’ in that humanity had decisively rejected the 20th century challenges of market economies and democracy in the form of Fascism and Soviet Communism. For a time, lightly regulated markets supported by the institutions to make them work well was the sine qua non for successful economies. We might as well dispute that the world was round than challenge that common sense: until 2008 that is.

Yet it is still the case that we do not know how to build democratically-controlled market economies that meet the needs of the many to live the life they wish to with dignity, in ways that are within the limits of the ecosystem to provide resources and absorb its wastes. The Diverse Economies perspective has recently suggested the need for a ‘economic ethics for the Anthropocene’ which focusses on how we want to live, in common, in ways that respect the ecosystem, other species, and other people both now and in the future.

I want to argue that developing an ethics of How we should live is valuable, but perhaps the issue is less to imagine other ethical perspectives than to examine practices for living in a convivial economy. The paper looks at two areas in which a convivial, democratically-controlled economy is being enacted, through community currencies and worker managed firms, to examine the extent that practices are enabling a different ethics to be enacted.

Reflections on science, research and practice

Last year Markus Hesse was invited to contribute to the Kolumne (‘column’) in disP – The Planning Review, published 4 times a year by Taylor & Francis in association with the ETH Zurich. The journal is devoted to professionals in research and in practice who are interested in European planning issues. For more see http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdsp20.

The contribution comprised a series of small commentaries (2 pages) that were addressing popular claims on the purchase of contemporary research, such as innovation, science-policy interaction or transdisciplinarity. These comments can also be read as somehow summarizing a particular style of thought that is cautious on such expectations and insists on a reflective, independent and critical positioning of science in general and the researcher in particular. The fourth and final piece of this series on 'Language' came out recently; a couple of free copies may be still available here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/UJpe8hq2hmW8QwhwCDPR/full.

Guest Lecture - Dr. Olivia Bina (U. Lisbon), Mind the Gap: Our future imagined in popular art and in the Grand Societal Challenges

The Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning welcomes Dr. Olivia Bina 
 

Tuesday, 23 February 2016, 12:30 -14:00
Campus Belval, Maison des Sciences Humaines, Black Box

European science policy (so-called Horizon 2020) is guided by Grand Societal Challenges (GSCs) with the explicit aim of shaping the future. In this talk I propose an innovative approach to the analysis and critique of Europe’s GSCs. As part of a task within FP7 project FLAGSHIP I ask: what do imagined futures and challenges within fiction (novels and films) have to say about our policy-defined challenges, and why does it matter?

The aim is to explore how speculative and creative fiction offer ways of embodying, telling, imagining, and symbolizing ‘futures’, that can provide alternative frames and understandings to enrich the grand challenges of the 21st century, and the related rationale and agendas for ERA and H2020. There are six ways in which filmic and literary representations can be considered creative foresight methods, providing alternative perspectives on these central challenges, and warning signals for the science policy they inform. As well as, potentially for our futures.

I will highlight how fiction sees oppression, inequality and a range of ethical issues linked to the dignity of humans and nature, as central to, and inseparable from innovation, technology and science. I conclude identifying warning signals in four major domains, arguing that these signals are compelling, and ought to be heard, not least because elements of such future have already escaped the imaginary world to make part of today’s experience. I identify areas poorly defined or absent from Europe’s science agenda, question our technoscience agenda and argue for the need to increase research into human, social, political and cultural processes involved in techno-science endeavours.

CFP- RGS-IBG - Be constructive! Situating sustainability research between positivism and reflective positionality

Proposal for a paper session at the Annual Conference 2016 of RGS-IBG, London, 30 August – 2 September, 2016

Organisers:

Constance Carr, University of Luxembourg

Markus Hesse, University of Luxembourg

Abstract

Sustainable development remains a powerful concept across European and global fields of policy-making. Spurred by the all-encompassing threat of climate change, the rhetoric of a great transformation successfully occupies current policy and practice. However, in contrast to the doom and gloom predictions, and in stark contrast to the sheer magnitude of the challenge of dealing with such complex set of problems, recent policy ideas and recipes seem trivial, and overly rationalized and optimistic. With respect to this, there are two interrelated issues that we want to explore in this session.

First, much of this new rationality of sustainability moults into popular labels such as ‘green’ or ‘smart’ where the city is the primary setting. This search for practical solutions in the city is further buttressed by the ‘sustainability business’ and associated green-washing practices that have emerged, as well as a variety of tools to assess, monitor, evaluate, and certify sustainability initiatives (indicators, metrics, and planning orthodoxies such as density, integrated, or holistic planning) that have become standard practice. Scholars have been active to identify the pitfalls here: Elgert & Krueger (2012) discussed the epistemology of metrics; Wiig (2015) interrogated the corporate strategy of a multi such as IBM behind ‘smart city’; Angelo & Wachsmuth (2015) criticized ‘methodological cityism’ in political ecology; Purcell (2006) showed the limits to localism; Mössner (2013) exposed socio-political limits of green cities. These criticisms highlight that there is something else to explore beyond current notions of sustainability. In this session, we welcome further critiques of existing attempts, as well as imaginaries of sustainability that embrace more contemporary imaginaries of urban geographies. These may include:

• Critical reflections on super-optimist projects such as transition towns, or green cities (e.g. localism, methodological city-ism, green-washing in urban marketing);
• Research on the disparity between the normative of sustainable development and current policy realities (How has this disparity changed? How is it produced? What lays outside the current lens? How has green urbanism changed over time and across places?)

The second issue relates to expectations of knowledge proliferation in academia, as research communities are increasingly embedded in contradictory settings, expected to provide results and not problems, to be frank but constructive, and moreover, to be elite, excellent, income-generating as well as critical. In this respect, there is thus good reason to analyse the research-policy nexus, as Woods & Gardner (2011), Pain (2006), and Beaumont et al. (2005) have explored, examine the construction of knowledge claims as Rydin (2007) has explained, and rework some considerations with regards to rationalist modes in sustainable development and emerging sustainability modernities. We thus also want to, additionally, interrogate the tensions between the construction of positivist sustainability on the one hand, and the position of the critical researcher on the other hand, treading the fine line between Dennis Judd’s claim that urban scholars tend to assume that “everything is always going to hell” (Judd 2005) and Elbert Hubbard’s classical “positive anything is better than negative nothing” (Hawthorne 1902). Concrete questions in this regard may include:

• Who is producing and endorsing claims to knowledge in practices of sustainable development urbanism?
• What are the possibilities and limitations for researchers to balance constructive interventionism with realistic limits of sustainable development and all its complexities, messy politics, wicked problems that are observed in human geography?
• How is it possible to pursue state-led contract work while maintaining critical integrity?
• What are relevant reflections the ontology, methodology and ethics of applied SD research practice?

Lastly, we also welcome contributions that address how these two issues intersect and are interrelated. Please send abstracts of ca. 250 words, including a preliminary title, by February 10, 2016 to Constance Carr (constance.carr@uni.lu) and Markus Hesse (markus.hesse@uni.lu)

Call for Abstracts Deadline

February 10, 2016

Bibliography

Angelo, H. & Wachsmuth, D. 2015. “Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12105

Beaumont, J., Loopmans, M. & Uitermark, J. 2005. “Politicization of research and the relevance of geography: Some experiences and reflections for an ongoing debate”. Area 37: 118-126.

Elgert, L. & Krueger, R. 2012. “Modernising sustainable development? Standardisation, evidence and experts in local indicators”. Local Environment 7(5) 561-571.

Hawthorne, H. (1902) “Contemplations: being, several short essays, helpful sermonettes, epigrams, and orphic saying selected from the writings of Elbert Hubbard” NY, The Roycrofters.

Judd, D. R. (2005). “Everything is always going to hell. Urban scholars as end-time prophets”. Urban Affairs Review 41 (2), 119-131.

Lyons, N. (ed.) 2010. “Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry: Mapping a Way of Knowing for Professional Reflective Inquiry”. Springer, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-85744-2

Mössner, S. 2013. Sustainable Urban Development as Consensual Practice: Post-Politics in Freiburg, Germany. Regional Studies 10.1080/00343404.2015.110287

Pain, R. 2006. “Seven deadly myths in policy research”. Progress in Human Geography 30: 250-259.

Purcell, M. 2006. “Urban democracy and the local trap”. Urban Studies 43(11) 1921-1941

Rydin, Y. 2007. “Re-examining the role of Knowledge within planning Theory” Planning Theory 6(1) 52-68.

Wiig, A. (2015). “IBM’s smart city as techno-utopian policy mobility”. City 19 (2-3), 258-273.

Woods, M. & Gardner, G. 2011. “Applied policy research and critical human geography: Some reflections on swimming in murky waters”. Dialogues in Human Geography 1(2) 198-214.

Guest Lecture: Robert Shaw (University of Newcastle) on The Fragmenting Frontier of Night in an Urban World

The Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Luxembourg is happy to present Dr Robert Shaw, from Newcastle University, who will be here to give a talk on his forthcoming book about the urban night.
 
Tuesday, 19 January 2016, 18:00 - 19:30
Maison des Sciences Humaines (MSH), Blackbox 
11, Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-Belval

In an area of global connections, increasingly ‘smart’ cities and increased social, economic and political flows, what remains of ‘night’ in an urban context? Does the darkness, solitude and isolation of night persist into the twenty first century? Can night still function as a space for outsiders, dissidents, what sociologists what called ‘the deviant’? And why should night matter to our understanding of the city at all?

In this presentation I will explore these questions by reflecting on the dominant conceptualisation of night as frontier (Melbin, Schivelbusch, Giwazdzinski), offering a sympathetic critique which seeks to retain the value of this metaphor in face of the apparently totalising forces of globalisation. I will argue that the spread of capitalism and strategies of governmentality into the night have caused the nocturnal frontier to fragment, with cities necessarily using night as part of an integrated twenty-four hour system for cities to function. I will align such a spread with debates about ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner, McFarlane, Robinson), drawing connections between the spatial transformations identified in that discourses and the temporal transformations about which I speak. Supported by a series of case studies, I argue that night seems to remain as a powerful force in cities for a number of reasons, and that there are several potential benefits for a continued fostering of the nocturnal in our cities. In conclusion, I note some of the future directions that social scientists of the night might explore.