We invite proposals for paper presentations, workshops/interactive sessions, posters/exhibits, virtual lightning talks, virtual posters, or colloquia addressing one of the following themes:

Theme 1: Urban and Extraurban Spaces

On the changing nature of the urban, and its relations to the ‘extraurban’.

  • Urban modernity: its forms and dynamics
  • Property costs and the mortgage crisis
  • Edge-urban spaces and ‘sprawl’
  • De-urban spaces: processes and consequences of urban decay and ‘hollowing out’
  • Micro-urban spaces: the changing role and dynamics of small urban communities
  • Greenfield spaces and regional development
  • Off-the grid spaces and development in formerly remote places
  • Globalization and its local effects
  • Economic development dynamics: changing sites of production and employment
  • Local and global labor markets
  • Socio-economic inequalities: proximities and distances
  • Ethnic and racial separation, juxtaposition and integration

Theme 2: Human Environments and Ecosystemic Effects

On the ecosystemic dynamics of different human socio-spatial configurations.

  • Environmental effects: urban, edge-urban, de-urban, micro-urban, greenfield, off-the-grid.
  • Human and environmental sustainability
  • Place and identity
  • Neighborhood in practice and imagination
  • Green dynamics: old and new energy systems
  • Land as resource
  • Agricultural dynamics: old and new food systems
  • Water dynamics: old and new sources and modes of access
  • Waste dynamics: old and new garbage, sewerage and disposal/recycling dynamics

Theme 3: Material and Immaterial Flows

On the flows of objects and knowledge/culture and the socio-spatial dynamics of contemporary life.

  • Transportation infrastructures and patterns
  • Local-global production flows
  • Grid-nodality versus distributed grid structures
  • Dispersed versus centralized governance
  • Demographic and other data: measuring spaces in relation to flows
  • The spatiality of the internet
  • Commuting and telecommuting
  • Migration and diaspora
  • Shopping centers and shopping online
  • Learning sites and learning online
  • Culture in person and culture online
  • Old communications and information media and new
  • Planning processes: the practices of (re)configuring spaces and flows
  • Research agendas for spaces and flows

2018 Special Focus: Mobilities in the Global North and South – Critical Urban and Global Visions

There has been rapid growth in attention to mobilities in the social sciences since the turn of the millennium, and with good reason. Mobile perspectives underline how the experience of globalization is in myriad ways defined through ever-increasing mobility: ranging from the concrete transportation systems and infrastructures enabling the flows of people negotiating everyday urban and global mobilities, to the movement of capital and socio-economic classes into or out of urban habitats; from the manufactured goods and hazardous wastes carried across extensive and intricate logistics networks, to the transfer and diffusion of urban governance policies, practices, and ideas; and from the dynamics of those migrating by choice, to those fleeing (or being left behind) in the face of war, crisis, or conflict. Far from simply being a “marker of an era” or a “neutral means to an end”, mobilities are deeply meaningful and embodied, gendered and racialized, and bound up in social, cultural, and political struggle from the local to the global. Particular challenges emerge from studying mobilities in various disciplines, affecting our epistemologies, methodologies, and theoretical concepts of the global and the urban.

With an eye on the extraordinary breadth of the theme, the conference organizers welcome contributions that critically explore mobilities in all their diversity.

Submit your proposal by 25 October 2017.

We welcome the submission of proposals at any time of the year. All proposals will be reviewed within two to four weeks of submission.