Track 4
4_RESEARCHING AND CONCEPTUALIZING VARIEGATED URBANIZATION AND URBANISM
Recent years have seen a resurgence of debates over the meaning and the material constitution of the urban. Through notions like "planetary urbanisation", "global urbanism", and "world of cities", urban scholars are attempting at rethinking urbanisation and urban forms of coexistence under contemporary capitalist globalisation and its critique. Issues of diversity, differentiation and expansion have particularly come to the fore within these debates, but extant discussions have somehow proven unable to provide a synthetic view of contemporary forms of urbanisation and urbanism.
Drawing on the notion of variegation, this track proposes to interpret contemporary processes of urbanisation as the outcome of conflicting but also mutually reinforcing logics of global homogenisation vs. local and regional diversification, adaptation and hybridisation. In particular, the track calls attention on the following themes and related research questions:
Recent years have seen a resurgence of debates over the meaning and the material constitution of the urban. Through notions like "planetary urbanisation", "global urbanism", and "world of cities", urban scholars are attempting at rethinking urbanisation and urban forms of coexistence under contemporary capitalist globalisation and its critique. Issues of diversity, differentiation and expansion have particularly come to the fore within these debates, but extant discussions have somehow proven unable to provide a synthetic view of contemporary forms of urbanisation and urbanism.
Drawing on the notion of variegation, this track proposes to interpret contemporary processes of urbanisation as the outcome of conflicting but also mutually reinforcing logics of global homogenisation vs. local and regional diversification, adaptation and hybridisation. In particular, the track calls attention on the following themes and related research questions:
- How strategies and tactics of comparative urbanism help us investigate variegated urbanisation and urbanism?
- Debates over the configuration of the European urban space have oscillated between the identification of the European distinctiveness (policentricity, compact historical cities, socially inclusive mode of governance as the "European vision of urban development") and the sense of a European conformation to standard models of global urbanisation (gentrification, increasing socio-spatial segregation, spectacularisation of urban development). Is the notion of variegated suited to solve this dichotomy?
- European states are unevenly responding to the new wave of international migrants and refugees. How differentiated forms and patterns of urbanisation and urbanism are reacting and adapting to the global phenomenon of immigration? What can be the reactions of and consequences on dynamically vs. starkly shrinking urban areas?
- What is the economic base of contemporary economic urbanisation and urbanism? Are urban economies witnessing a renaissance or a decline?
- In a context of variegated urbanisation, what are the spatial limits and administrative boundaries of cities and metropolitan areas? To what extent can countries/cities bring closer to each other in spatial sense the economic realities and the administrative delineations of urban areas?
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