Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Romola Sanyal (London School of Economics)

For the international workshop "Urban World-Making," the ASCA Cities Project invites papers that explore contemporary processes of ‘worlding’ in relation to urban environments.

Date: Friday 2 June 2017
Location: University of Amsterdam

This one-day workshop will reflect on urban worlds and practices of “worlding”. For Ananya Roy (2011), “the concept of worlding seeks to recover and restore the vast array of global strategies that are being staged at the urban scale around the world.” We specifically aim to extend the focus beyond so-called ‘global’ or ‘world cities,’ recognizing instead that a variety of cities now function as “worlding nodes” that “create global connections and global regimes of value” (McCann, Roy and Ward, 2013). In addition, we understand worlding as pertaining to both elite aspirations of world-class cities and to bottom-up practices of “worlding from below” (Simone, 2011). Accordingly, in both the Global North and South, worlding practices are inextricably linked to power relations, inequalities, crises and various forms of urban segregation.

We are interested, firstly, in how creative, cultural and/or political practices by a diverse range of actors imagine, experience, aestheticize and organize urban environments under conditions of globalization. Secondly, we hope to critically examine some of the dominant narratives, images and imaginaries – such as the ‘divided city,’ the ‘slum-ridden megacity’ or the ‘global city’ – through which specific cities are worlded in globalized debates of urban studies, recognizing the profound impact of these imaginaries on everyday life in these cities. Finally, we are interested in how diverse actors in marginalised spaces and/or spaces of crisis contribute to the worlding of urban knowledge.

We welcome abstracts from different scholarly disciplines. Topics might be related, but by no means limited to, the following questions:

- In what ways are global processes bound up with lived experience and affective geographies?
- How do elite aspirations of world-class cities relate to processes and practices of worlding from below?
- How is the imagination of world systems or global connectivity articulated in creative praxis? Which methods – including and extending beyond visualization – can be used to track urban processes, relations or temporal flows?
- How do marginalised spaces and/or spaces of crisis participate and contribute to the worlding of urban knowledge?
- What are the “itineraries of recognition” through which specific cities are worlded in scholarly discourse, and how does this relate to dominant “geographies of theory” (Roy, 2009)?

Please submit abstracts (max 300 words, for 20 min papers) to Simone Kalkman (a.s.kalkman@uva.nl) by 15 January 2017.

For any inquiries please contact the organizers Simone Kalkman (a.s.kalkman@uva.nl) / Carolyn Birdsall (c.j.birdsall@uva.nl).