Abstracts accepted in English, Portuguese and Spanish.
Cristina Temenos
Cristina.temenos@manchester.ac.uk
Jess Linz
Paula Soto
Anna Levy
In times of crisis, the state of exception, disaster capitalism, and the shock doctrine have been both important and well known lenses for tracking the consolidation of power, the privatization of public goods, and for giving cover to accelerated recovery that amplifies uneven development. And yet, crises are also conceived as opportunities to challenge the status quo: what is revealed in crisis holds a grain of possibility, even, for dismantling capitalist and colonial structures (Rivera Cusicanqui 2016) and making way for new futures to emerge from present contradictions (McNelly 2022, Zavaleta 2006). While urban crisis has long been an object of inquiry within urban studies, it has largely been theorized in anglo-scholarship from cities of the Global North: focusing on the role of crisis in capital accumulation and the spatiality of the built environment (Harvey 1989, Jessop 2012), crisis as event and the ways that it shapes spaces and politics (Agamben 2005), and crisis as an ongoing, ever-present condition (Harris and Nowicki, 2018).
Cities are sites of experimentation during crises, either preventing or encouraging wider social change and resolving real or perceived past failures. Having profound effects on cities and urban life, crisis can uniquely rework multi-sector decision making processes (Brown 2009, Misses-Liwerant et al 2021, Temenos 2022, Vecchio & Tiznado-Aitken 2020). As a site where the mundane aspects of both systemic and specific crises merge, cities are critical for contending with the everyday geographies of crisis. This panel will be open to those coming from and speaking to a range of crisis scenarios from political crisis to economic crisis to racial justice crisis to natural disasters, among others. As contemporary ‘urban crisis’ generally fall into three areas: economic, ecological, and social (Bayırbağ et al 2017, Harvey 1989, Mayer 2020, Tonkiss 2017), this session seeks to expand and spatialize urban crisis and foreground scholarship and theory on urban crisis from urbanists globally. We are interested practitioner, movement, and scholarly perspectives that engage spatialities of intersecting urban crises from the perspective of specific subjects, for example, but not limited to: (women, children, migrants, etc.); perspective of specific actors ( eg inhabitants, planners, urban planners, organized civil society, etc.); and from the perspective of specific actors (eg inhabitants, planners, urban planners, organized civil society) in order to ask:
• What politics, processes, and tools are employed during times of crisis and how do the applications of different political strategies engender subsequent crises or indeed work to overcome them?
• What dynamics emerge in crisis that open or close possibilities for justice?
• How are crises played out differently across cities in the Global North, Global South or Global East?
• What can emergent thinking from abolitionist, de-, and anti-colonial scholarship bring to theorizing the spatialities of crisis?
• How are crisis and recovery related?
• What new imaginaries do moments of urban crisis bring about?
This themed session invites stories, strategies, cases, and exchanges from and among scholars, political strategists and policy makers, grassroots collectives, and journalists among others, to discuss crisis openings for advancing and laying the groundwork for solidarity, liberation, strengthening or universalizing public services or goods, and or progressive policy.