Planning ‘Smart’ City-Regions in an Age of Neoliberalizing Urbanism

[i]Call for Papers [/i] Conference of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers 26-28th August 2009, Manchester Any student looking to gain some rudimentary understanding of the form, character and planning of contemporary cities across the global urban landscape could be forgiven for being a touch bewildered by some of the mixed messages available. On one level, they would be informed that, amid the purportedly inescapable ascendence of a neoliberal global political economy, cities are increasingly being subjected to the vagaries of market rule, or, perhaps more accurately, a mode of ‘state-authored market fundamentalism’ (Peck, 2004). Some of the most notable economic and environmental impacts of this neoliberal urbanism (Wilson, 2004) sees urban regions being further stretched in the form of untrammeled suburban and ex-urban sprawl and the formation of private sector-led edge cities, alongside a fragmentation or splintering vis-a-vis a rise in privatized housing communities and gentrified enclaves, all leading to unavoidable increases in automobile travel and a related erosion of public space and the public realm. This neoliberal urbanism also appears to be embedding in erstwhile ‘statist’ districts of the city, not least through the third-wave gentrification of social housing. And, notably, it is also fostering heightened social inequalities and an intense ‘enclosure’ of cities in the global south, as highlighted in recent work by Mike Davis and Loic Wacquant. Crucially, this is also a landscape that implicates the decision-making of planners, albeit they themselves are increasingly subjectified with ‘entrepreneurial’ values (Sandercock, 1998). And yet, at the same time our keenly intrepid student would encounter a whole range of debates within geography, planning, and environmental studies pertaining to the creation of ‘smart growth’ and the fostering of ‘eco-towns’, ‘creative cities’, ‘urban villages’, ‘new urbanist’ developments, ‘master-planned’ communities, and informational superhighways and post-industrial corridors of growth. Each of these examples – and they increasingly operate on a global scale – emphasizes a decisive role for planners working together with developers, infrastructure providers, key economic actors and political elites, all with aspirations to create and shape an economically creative, ecologically sustainable, and socially inclusive urban-regional environment. Often this also aims to cultivate a renewal of the civic realm, and perhaps even a reversal of uncontrolled automobile-dependent suburban sprawl. In some crucial respects, these aspirational discourses would seem to imply either a departure from, or at least some compromising of, a market-fundamentalist neoliberal urban landscape and vernacular. All of which raises some searching questions about how, as scholars of planning and environmental geography, we are to evaluate these seemingly competing claims. For instance, how far do strategies to induce creative cities, smart growth and new urbanist principles represent a meaningful departure from neoliberalism? Or, alternatively, do these ostensibly progressive moments in the planning process represent a further embedding of privatized power, in the process de-politicizing potential conflict, and fostering fresh opportunities for developers to realize surplus value? This session is keen to explore these tensions, and seeks papers which examine the connections between ‘local’ transitions and the ‘general’ urbanization process. We would also particularly welcome papers the that explore new emergent paradigms of ‘smart’ urban development, and contributions along the following themes would be most welcome: - Local and regional sustainable development - Smart growth - New urbanism - Compact urban development - Green infrastructure planning - Transportation and mobility - Public-private government/governance - Quality of life - Social equity and inclusion in planning - Environmental justice - Progressive or predatory planning Abstracts and expressions of interest with full contact details should be emailed by 6th February 2009 at the latest to one of the organizers at the following email addresses: David Gibbs:[url=mailto:D.C.Gibbs@hull.ac.uk]D.C.Gibbs@hull.ac.uk[/url] Rob Krueger: [url=mailto:krueger@WPI.EDU]krueger@WPI.EDU[/url] Gordon MacLeod: [url=mailto:Gordon.MacLeod@durham.ac.uk]Gordon.MacLeod@durham.ac.uk[/url]