IUR Researchers at the 8th Nordic Geographers Meeting

• Trondheim, Norway

Hosted by the Department of Geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the 8th Nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM) is coming up in June. IUR Researchers will organize the following sessions:

Property in Practice

In this session we seek to explore how conceptions of property inform urban development and everyday urban practice. Property is a powerful normative concept but also highly complex. There is little knowledge of the diverse ways in which the rights and obligations attributed to property ownership are articulated and operated by public and private actors, and how they influence urban development decisions and practices. We welcome studies that explore the different understandings of property that can be observed in various urban development practices, how property rights and obligations are formulated, performed and negotiated by different actors. We welcome a wide range of studies from various perspectives: legal, social, spatial, historical and from everyday life. The track is particularly interested in contributions that explore the tensions between these perspectives. Contributions might address for instance: how property is performed in urban planning negotiations, in processes of enclosure and commoning, in shifting regulations of property, in the changing role of the public sector in management of public space or shifting conceptions of the public and the private among urbanites.

Convenor: Peter Parker. Research Platform: Shifting Conceptualizations of Property in Sweden

Shaping the future through smart urban visions

Discourses around smart cities are tied up with seductive and normative visions with technology as the driver for change (Luque-Ayala et al., 2016) concealing larger neoliberal agendas and practices in the process (Scott, 2016). Initiatives to create urban growth and renewal increasingly come from private actors and global corporations representing a challenge to public visions of the common good in favour of corporate interests of scalable profit. The scope of smart visions is to make digital technology help pave the way toward economic, environmental and social sustainability. Meanwhile, the kind of techno-utopianism that smart visions represent seems to reproduce an old assumption of a neutral, objective analytic gaze that is gaining terrain with renewed strength through computational analysis and big data.

In this paper session we wish to critically address smart visions and/or digital technologies from a social science perspective. Our starting point is an interest in sorting out the implications for the formation of sociality and identity and/or underlying gendered, classed and racialized processes (to name a few). We hope to trigger discussions that can deepen our understanding of how gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race and class are produced in and through the imagination and governance of smart urban visions. How does smart visions and technologies affect bodies and subjectivities in their co-constitutive relation with the built, infrastructural and digital urban environments? In what ways are smart visions and technologies including some groups and not others?

Covenors: Maja de Neergaard, Carina Listerborn and Guy Baeten

IUR researchers will also present the following papers:

Invisible urbanization? White elephants, industrial ghosts, and lesser evils in the global hinterlands 

Presenter: Claudia Fonseca Alfaro. Session: Struggling with the planetary turn