The Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning of TU Wien in Austria and the Centre for the Future of Places at KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm in Sweden invite participation in the International Urban Studies Conference on Cities Action Research andEducation.

With the focus on action, research and education, the conference will explore mutually formative relations between cities and care. We aim to discuss ambivalences inherent to care in regard to achieved progresses and ongoing struggles as well as to reflect on the power of caring practices in shaping solidary urban futures. The conference will pursue a more systematic integration of a plurality of empirical, methodological, theoretical and ethical approaches to care in urban studies, and invites different disciplinary perspectives, including social sciences, humanities and the spatial arts.

While the struggles for egalitarian society have gained a momentum promising to reshape inter-personal geographies of inequality, processes of capitalist urbanization continue to bear their extractive, perverted and dispossessive features. The concept of care allows for connecting the early modern focus on (factory) workers as the realm for urban resistance with late modern interest in the urban population as a key agent for change in order to rethink the relation between labour, habiting and care in contemporary times. Particularly neo-Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches have engaged with the scales, dimensions and practices of care to accentuate ‘other’ realms of labour (no paid, low paid, underpaid) and underrated forms of political organization of resistance (non-movements, quiet encroachments, fragmented mass activism) that play out in the public and private realms of contemporary cities, as well as across their divides. Endeavours that call for an ethical engagement with urban citizens, communities and collectives trigger a care debate that challenges and enriches the focus on spatial justice and urban rights. In this context, this conference aims to ‘map’, ‘sketch’ or ‘engage with’ analytical dimensions of care by emphasising everyday life as a dazzling, yet ambivalent interface for intersectional research of multiple notions of care.

The goal of the conference is to forward thoughts about care in three themes: (I) socio-spatial (in)equalities and the work of care; (II) struggles and contestations around care and (III) new care arrangements and civic innovation. In all of the three thematic panels the conference explores different notions of care, and thus invites contributions reflecting one or more of the following aspects:

• Lack of Care and Social Inequality: Precarity, Marginalization and the Production of Disadvantage;
• Urban Regimes of Care: (Capitalist) Colonization of Care Relations and Urbanization;
• Care, Labour and Society: Between Individualization, Solidarization and Collectivization;
• Care and the Ordinary: Lived Space, (the Critique of) Everyday Life;
• Geographies of Encounter and Public Space: Affect, Performativity and Care;
• Care Ecologies: Controversies around Urban Scales and Efforts of Scaling Care;
• Care from a Transnational and Trans-local Perspective: Migration, Mobility and Postmigration;
• Ambivalences of Care: Between Careful, Careless and Carefree Cities.

We look forward to original contributions that address the themes of care in urban studies from one or more of the above mentioned angles. Embedded in the KTH & TU Wien Joint Visiting Professorship Program in Urban Studies at TU Wien, the conference works across urban practice and urban theory. We invite an interdisciplinary public from universities, research institutes, offices, public authorities, activist groups, consultancies, and others to present contributions to the field of urban studies that address aspects of care through foci on research ethics, concepts, methodologies or empirical evidence.

Abstract submission: Abstract of paper proposals (250 words) should take up and speak to at least one of the dimensions of care delineated in the call. Speakers are asked to submit a short biography (50 words) and indicate the thematic panel that their contribution could connect to (1st choice, 2nd choice). Please send your proposal to [email protected].

Registration: To register for the conference please send an email to [email protected], stating your name and affiliation (conference registration fee: tbc).

Publication: During the conference preparation process, an international and peer-reviewed book publication project will be prepared. This publication-by-conference will use the conference as space for discussing first article drafts and developing profound relations between authors and editors, based on the possibility for face-to-face encounter and exchange. That is why we will ask for first paper drafts to be submitted to the scientific conference committee by 15 September 2019.

Important dates

• Deadline for paper proposal submissions: 15 May 2019
• Notification of paper acceptance: 15 July 2019
• Deadline for conference registration: 1 September 2019
• Submission date of 1st paper draft: 15 September 2019

2. Themes

The conference is organized into three themes:

I. SOCIO-SPATIAL (IN)EQUALITIES AND THE WORK OF CARE

Session Chairs: Nir Cohen and Sabine Knierbein 

Care work has long been socio-spatially unequal. Not only has it traditionally been the work of ethno-racialized, classed and gendered minorities (e.g., women, slaves, and labour migrants), but it has been predominantly relegated to marginal, primarily privatized, spaces and places, marking it largely a problem of ‘idiosyncratic individuals’ rather than a social concern. Also, spatial inequalities play out significantly when it comes to local access and rights to resources. The panel invites papers that attend to the discourses and practices of care, through which these and other processes of social and spatial unevenness have been (re)-produced, negotiated and at times transformed. We welcome papers that advance our understanding of inequalities that undergird everyday spaces of (urban) care like hospitals, shelters, and homes but also those taking a more institutional and policy-oriented perspective on care giving, receiving, and highlighting the ways through which they unfold at – and unevenly impact – the urban landscape. We wish to encourage researchers working in different geographical, social and historical contexts and employing a wide range of theories and methodologies as well as an ethics of care.

II. STRUGGLES AND CONTESTATIONS AROUND CARE

Session Chairs: Kim Trogal and Tihomir Viderman 

Care labour is essential in sustaining our societies and indeed is economically fundamental, yet it is work that is often disavowed, as are the very real material dependencies performed through care and care work. We recognise the longstanding ‘crisis of care’, which today manifests itself in the dismantling of the welfare state and the increasing externalisation and commodification of care. This can be more generally understood as the ways in which capitalism destroys its own conditions of possibility. This panel invites discussions and investigations into the range of struggles and contestations taking place around care, waged or unwaged. In these conditions, when people cannot actually re-produce and maintain the society in which they live, what responses and different forms of struggle are emerging, including not only progressive movements, but also conservative and reactionary backlashes? What resources or relations enable capacities to resist? How are these struggles connected to other related struggles and how might those forms of resistance or protest become actualised at the level of the neighbourhood or city?

III. NEW CARE ARRANGEMENTS AND CIVIC INNOVATION

Session Chairs: Angelika Gabauer and Henrik Lebuhn 

With the restructuring of the welfare state including the dramatic housing crisis, the restructuring and reorganization of the labour market, and the rearrangement of family structures including the weakening of the traditional nuclear family model, the care sector has been undergoing major changes in recent decades. New transnational business models have emerged that specialize in exploiting regional inequalities, the precarisation of labour and il/legal forms of outsourcing and subcontracting. Struggles for care and recognition have given rise to new cross-actor solidarity movements and civic innovations such as forms of migrant care worker activism, multigenerational housing projects and queer parenting models. These, in turn, are often quite ambivalent themselves and torn between being integrated into neoliberal forms of self-responsabilisation, biopolitical self-optimization and collective resistance. This panel invites contributions that tackle dimensions between individualization and de-solidarisation on the one hand, and new forms of solidarity and collectivization on the other hand. It is interested in new arrangements and civic innovations in the field of care and asks specifically how these arrangements play out in the urban realm and how they relate to spatial conditions of in/justice in the city.

3. Format and Venue

20 – 21 November 2019: The Cities Action Research Education Conference takes place at TUtheSky at the Campus Getreidemarkt, TU Wien, Getreidemarkt 9, 11th floor, 1060 Vienna, Austria. The venue offers space for approx. 150 people.

22 November 2019: The 2-days conference features a third day, organized by different actors and institutions in Vienna and curated by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space. The Add-On Day will include the EPUM Multiplier Event: URBAN FORM, (IN)EQUALITY AND (IN)JUSTICE: RESEARCH AND EDUCATION, a meeting of the Thematic Group for Public Spaces and Urban Culture of the Association of European Schools of Planning, and excursions to different sites and communities in Vienna.

4. Scientific Conference Committee

• Nir Cohen, Dr., Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography & Environment, Bar Ilan University, Israel, KTH & TU Wien Visiting Professor 2019
• Angelika Gabauer, MA, University Assistant, Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space, TU Wien, Austria
• Tigran Haas, Dr., Associate Professor of Urban Planning + Urban Design, Director of the Center for the Future of Places (CFP) at the ABE School at KTH Stockholm, Sweden
• Sabine Knierbein, Dr., Associate Professor of Urban Culture and Public Space, Head of Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space, TU Wien, Austria
• Henrik Lebuhn, Dr., Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Sociology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, KTH & TU Wien Visiting Professor 2019
• Kim Trogal, Dr., Lecturer in Architecture History and Theory, UCA Canterbury, UK,KTH & TU Wien Designated Visiting Professor 2020
• Tihomir Viderman, DI MSc, Research Assistant, BTU Cottbus, Germany and Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space, TU Wien, Austria