6. + 7. November 2020 | Organization: Prof. David Kaufmann, ETH Zürich.
This panel is part of the stream «Cities, Regions, Economies»; Stream organizers: Sven Daniel Wolfe and Julio Paulos.
Urban planning and policy-making with/without/against national states
Cities are ‘burning glasses’ of our society (Kaufmann and Sidney 2020). The speed, intensity, and relentlessness of global transformative processes and forces such as climate change, capitalist economic globalization, migration, digitization or pandemics manifest themselves first and most clearly in cities. Similarly, confrontations between public and private property, power and justice, wealth and poverty take their physical form in cities (e.g. Magnusson 2011; Boudreau 2016). This puts cities in a position to react or plan earlier, differently, and more radical than supralocal governments.
Various policy examples from cities worldwide, such as participatory planning and budgeting (Avritzer 2006; Friendly and Stiphany 2019), carbon neutral cities (Hughes 2019), sanctuary cities (Collingwood and O’Brien 2019; Kaufmann 2019), or progressive drug policies (Kübler and Wälti 2001) reveal the innovative, radical and disruptive potential of urban policies. Some of these policies diffused to other cities and other levels of government, some of them profoundly challenged national state policy-making. This reveals the potential of the urban arena for a democratization of the society and economy, for example, in projects of New Municipalism (Russell 2019; Thompson 2020). Yet, assessed by their prospects for contributing to a just, democratic, and sustainable future, the set of policies that cities enact may be found deeply ambivalent (Purcell 2006; Enright and Rossi 2017).
Against the backdrop of urban planning and policy-making that has the potential to challenge global statism, this panel invites conceptual and empirical contributions across all the social sciences. The panel wants to examine if and how cities plan more intense, innovative, or radical than national states (with), ignore or circumvent them (without) or directly oppose and undermine them (against). Submissions may want to address following themes:
- Conceptual reflections of urban planning and policy-making vis-à-vis supralocal planning and policy-making
- Urban planning for global transformations (climate change, migration, digitization, pandemics)
- Urban confrontations and their implications for planning and policy-making (e.g., land use conflicts)
- Urban reactions on exclusionary and nationalistic policies (e.g., sanctuary cities)
- Critical reflections on the ambivalency of urban planning and policy-making
- Radical and insurgent urban planning and policy-making
- Theories and observations of New Municpalism
- Agency of cities and political conflicts in multilevel governance arrangements
You can email queries and paper proposal abstracts (up to 300 words) to David Kaufmann until the 30th of June 2020.
Website of the 18th Swiss Geoscience Meeting 2020
Description of the stream «Cities, Regions, Economies»
References
Avritzer, Leonardo. 2006. New public spheres in Brazil: local democracy and deliberative politics. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30(3): 623–637.
Boudreau, Julie-Anne. 2016. Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State. Malden, MA: Polity Press
Collingwood, Loren, and Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien. 2019. Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge. Oxford University Press.
Enright, Theresa, and Ugo Rossi (eds.). 2017. The Urban Political: Ambivalent Spaces of Late Neoliberalism. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Friendly, Abigail, and Kristine Stiphany. 2019. Paradigm or paradox? The ‘cumbersome impasse’ of the participatory turn in Brazilian urban planning. Urban Studies 56(2): 271–287.
Hughes, Sara. 2019. Repowering Cities: Governing Climate Change Mitigation in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Cornell University Press.
Kaufmann, David. 2019. Comparing Urban Citizenship, Sanctuary Cities, Local Bureaucratic Membership, and Regularizations, Public Administration Review 79(3): 443–446.
Kaufmann, David, and Mara Sidney. 2020. Toward an urban policy analysis: Incorporating participation, multilevel governance, and ‘seeing like a city’, PS: Political Science & Politics 53 (1): 1-5.
Kübler, Daniel, and Sonja Wälti. 2001. Drug Policy‐Making in Metropolitan Areas: Urban Conflicts and Governance. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25(1): 35–54.
Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Purcell, Mark. 2006. Urban democracy and the local trap. Urban Studies 43(11): 1921–1941.
Russell, Bertie. 2019. Beyond the local trap: New municipalism and the rise of the fearless cities. Antipode 51(3): 989–1010.
Thompson, Matthew. 2020. What’s so new about New Municipalism? Progress in Human Geography. Early Online.
Organization
Prof. Dr. David Kaufmann, Assistant Professor of Spatial Development and Urban Policy, Institute for Spatial and Landscape Development, ETH Zürich