Progressive Geographies

Call for Papers – session at the ISA, San Francisco, April 3-6, 2013

Global/Urban/Politics: A Contemporary Condition, but not a New One?

Arguably one of the most important techniques of diffusion is the process of urbanization, whether thought geographically (Harvey) or sociologically (Wirth), yet the politics of the claim that we have transitioned to a ‘new’ global urban world are far from clear. This panel questions whether ‘global urban politics,’ as currently conceived, captures a condition that is certainly contemporary but not necessarily new. We engage the notion that ‘the global urban,’ precisely when thought as not new, requires and enables new approaches to theorizing politics in and of the world, enabling us to recognize how a global urban politics re-inscribes and undermines modernity in subtle and unexpected ways. We seek to offer a provocation to think about the political implications of this claim about urban diffusion as political transformation and a set of resources for theorizing with, through, and against our condition of global urban politics.

Contemporary accounts of global urbanization figure it as simultaneously spatial, temporal, sociological and subjective: in geographic spatiotemporal terms, it is the progressive expansion of the urban built form into non-urban places around the world (Seto et al. 2011) and in sociological and subjective terms, the global absorption of people into urban communities and urban ways of life (Wirth 1969, Davis 2006, Saunders 2010). The argument is building that urban geography is a global geography, urban sociology is a global sociology, and urban politics is now a global politics. All these threads, in their way, understand the global urban as an historically and empirically new development in late modern life.

Yet there is also a counter-narrative, according to which both the urban and the global are the basis of ‘modern’ politics. On the one hand, urbanism as a way of life can be understood as the condition of possibility for the modern politics of self-governing subjects (Magnusson 2011). On the other hand, the global is understood by some to be the condition of possibility for modern politics of the international system of states (Walker 1993 and 2010, Bartelson 2010). Rather than read these as competing claims, this panel will investigate the relationship between them – a relationship assumed in the popular notion that to become worldly is to become urban (Elden 2005 and 2004). While in empirical terms the global urban is just coming to pass, in conceptual terms there is evidence that the relationship between the global and the urban – rather than either the global or the urban alone – operates as the condition of possibility and regulative ideal for modern politics. It is crucial that we understand what form of relationship between the global and the urban can enable such a political equivalence. How does it play out? How does it influence and affect scholarship on the politics of contemporary urbanization?

We invite papers that address these complex questions. In particular, papers can (but need not) address the following dimensions:

1)    Globalized/urbanized space-times: Investigations of the problem of the space of the world and the spatiotemporal assumptions of the global in relation to accounts of urban space, particularly relational space. Given the contradictory and fundamentally unsettled claims about the spatiotemporalities of ‘the world’ versus ‘the urban,’ what are we to make of attempts to outline a single spatiotemporal model of global urbanization? On what basis are these claims made and what are their political effects?

2)    Globalized/urbanized political forms: Given the possibility of reading urbanization as a form of imperialism, investigations of the residual resonances that restrict the choice of political form to the polis or the imperium, each of which are modelled on a vision of the urban. Are there ways of thinking about politics that can unsettle these choices? Can we think of alternatives to the perception that the urban colonizes and is colonized by non-urban spaces and people on a global scale?

3)    Globalized/urbanized embodied practices: Investigations of the relationship between the city and the body in the context of contemporary claims about the globalized urban. Can we have a global urban without reproducing a medieval cosmos that saw the body as a microcosm of the universe (Short 2004)? What is at stake in continuing the political relationship between the body and the city?

Please email paper abstracts of 200 words to Delacey Tedesco (delacey@shaw.ca) by May 27, 2012, including full name, paper title, and author affiliation.