Call for Abstracts

#1 Youth, (Un)Care and the City

Session chair(s):

Rachel Almeida (Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais), Sabine Knierbein, Nir Cohen

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

In much of the world, young people have been systematically excluded from decision-making processes concerning urban development and public spaces. Whether through social and territorial marginalisation or through the invisibility of their experiences in policy design, youth are often reduced to “secondary users” of urban spaces, if not treated as a threat to public order. Such a perspective overlooks the fact that young people are protagonists in the social production of space, elaborating creative practices, modes of circulation, everyday resistances, and political mobilisations that fundamentally challenge and reconfigure ways of inhabiting the city.

Far from being passive recipients of urban policies, youth constitute themselves as both collective and individual subjects who articulate desires, practices of care, distinctive aesthetics, and insurgent forms of belonging. Whether through peripheral cultural production, the reappropriation of squares, streets, and public facilities, the experience of new gendered forms of belonging, the creative use of digital technologies, or the building of networks of solidarity and community support, young people exercise careful agency over urban space. These practices, often rendered invisible by formal policies, reveal dynamics that expand the notion of the right to the city towards debates about urban un(care), question exclusionary logics, and challenge hegemonic models of urban planning.
This session brings together contributions that explore the role of youth in the social production of space and in forms of political incidence across distinct geopolitical contexts. We are interested in understanding how factors such as territory, race, class, gender, education, and generation interact to shape the experiences of youth, influencing their practices of use, access, and appropriation of urban space. Equally relevant are analyses of how mobility, safety, technology, and social media affect the presence and organisation of youth in urban space, and their creative and collective responses to these challenges.

We are especially interested in the role of peripheral youth as intellectuals, resisting artists, and cultural agents who shape new urban horizons through different forms of solidarity and care, as well as innovative and aesthetic types of cultural products. This insurgent knowledge, especially when emerging from the margins, has the potential to influence public debate and inform more caring and democratic urban alternatives.
The session welcomes methodological explorations that articulate youth-oriented research, practice, and collaborative action, such as socio-spatial workshops, mappings, focus groups, exhibitions, and other forms of co-production of knowledge with young people and local communities that seek to combine embodied and virtual spaces into ‘vireal’ spaces of youth.

We seek contributions that combine empirical analyses, methodological advances, and theoretical reflections, exploring both localised case studies and complementary or transnational approaches. Of particular interest is the promotion of dialogue between researchers, artists, activists, and policymakers working in the fields of youth, urban space, and collective care. By emphasising creative practices, conflicts and possibilities of transformation led by young people, this session sheds light on under-recognised dimensions of youthful urban life and contributes to the construction of fairer cities learning from the new forms of literacy that young people bring along.

#2 Housing and land taxation: value capture, politics, and the making of the (unequal) city

Session chair(s):

Francesca Artioli (Université Paris Est-Créteil), Alessandro Coppola

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

The taxation of land and housing plays a key role in producing the built environment and socio-spatial inequality. Taxes and tax reliefs operate as policy tools that either capture or forgive part of the value accumulated in, and extracted from, land and housing ownership and development. This value can be privatised (by owners, developers, etc.), or collectively appropriated by the state (at various levels) and potentially redistributed. Fiscal arrangements channel capital into specific areas of the city or types of assets, while fiscally attractive locations draw transnational real estate investors. Governments also use taxes and tax reliefs to pursue urban policy goals ranging from boosting housing provision and economic growth to promoting the energy retrofitting of the built environment (Weber 2010; Pollard 2018). The effects of taxes thus materialise in urban forms, from office towers to suburban housing developments driven by tax-relief investment schemes. More broadly, land and housing taxes are embedded in the political economy of national and local welfare (Kholodilin et al. 2022; Martin 2008). They contribute to shaping wealth and income inequality—by facilitating patrimonial transmission, for instance—and unequal access to housing.

Taxes are therefore far from neutral instruments: they embody power relations between the state and property actors—households, corporate owners and developers alike—and reflect institutionalised beliefs around property rights, land rent, and the legitimate scope of state intervention. While often operating silently, fiscal tools can become matters of political struggle, especially when linked to issues of land and housing affordability, austerity, fiscal justice, socio-economic inequality, or climate change. The level and targets of land and housing taxation thus become objects of renewed political contestation.

Despite this ubiquitous and structural role, the taxation of land and housing remains largely under-researched in urban studies (Tapp and Kay 2019). This panel welcomes contributions from all disciplines and regions, employing qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods to engage with the fiscal-urban nexus.

In particular, contributions may explore:
• What is taxed (or not) across the property cycle—including ownership, development, acquisition, rental income, capital gains, family transmission, and tax reliefs—as well as what escapes taxation through optimisation and evasion strategies;
• Who is taxed (or not) in relation to types of owners (individual, corporate, non-resident, super-rich), uses of assets (primary homes, second homes, short- and long-term rentals, vacant properties), or types of land-use designation;
• How taxation shapes the built environment, influencing investment flows, land values, ownership and development patterns, and the geography of real estate acquisition and disposal;
• The relationship between taxation and socio-spatial inequality, notably how fiscal tools affect asset accumulation, household/corporate wealth, and access to affordable, sustainable housing, and how they balance private benefits and public returns;
• The politics of taxation, namely how fiscal tools are politicised, by whom, and how fiscal policies evolve—toward more progressive forms, or not, and for whose benefit.

By doing so, the panel aims to highlight the central yet often overlooked role of taxation in shaping the urban, while critically examining how old and new urban inequalities are produced—and sometimes contested—across the globe.

#3 (Im)possibilities of settling down in the post-migrant city

Session chair(s):

Raffael Beier (TU Dortmund University), Dilek Tepeli

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

While literature of post-migration has convincingly argued to see migration as the norm and not as the exception in contemporary urban societies (Yildiz & Hill 2014, Foroutan 2021), likewise, many urban citizens strive for a stable, decent place to inhabit. This basic anthropological need is increasingly under pressure and at risk of being overlooked by scholarship and political debates centring on mobility and movement rather than emplacement. In this session, we wish to shift perspectives, seeking to explore lived experiences of the (im)possibilities of ‘settling down’ of urban subjects at the intersection of urban and migration studies. Noting a growing concern about people’s ability to become and remain emplaced – both as a result of a growing political climate of hostility and a housing crisis marked by a normalization of displacement (Soederberg 2020, Lancione 2020) – we strive to radically rethink the post-migrant urban society from its opposite to mobility, namely human’s experiences, practices, and limitations of settling down. Beyond sectional and disciplinary divides, we conceive the ‘(im)possibilities of settling down’ as an emerging, yet unexplored category of social inequality and exclusion in post-migrant societies.

As the housing crisis prevails in todays’ post-migrant society, different forms of (enforced) mobility – affected by both race and class – are increasingly interwoven (cf., Adscheid 2024, Yiftachel 2020). To what extent does the inability of 'making home' on tense housing markets produce and maintain feelings of 'being migrant', whether it is about intra-urban, regional or transnational migration? Beyond race and class, we suggest our session to explore the ‘(im)possibilities of settling down’ as a new, experiential and affective category of social inequality combining material and socio-emotional forms of social exclusion. It affects ‘migrantized’ populations and people in precarious employment with and without so-called migration background at the same time. Precarious employment, racial discrimination (particularly being reinforced in the context of right-wing discourses about migration), rising rents, and the commodification of social housing lead to structural barriers on the housing market, which are paired with experiences of ex/inclusion and (non-)belonging on different levels ranging from political debates about re-migration, to non-representation and everyday experiences of bordering and racism in public space (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019). With an intersectional lens on gender, race, and class (Anthias 2012), we argue that it is only through the interplay of material and affective ex/inclusion that we can grasp the experiences of the ‘(im)possibilities of setting down’ over time.
Following this, we invite scholars with diverse disciplinary entry points to urban studies (from sociology to geography, economics as well as anthropology, cultural psychology, among others) to present their theoretical explorations and/or empirically grounded research focusing on the (im)possibilities of settling down. We are especially interested in long-term and biographical perspectives to housing, homing, and inhabitation, that stress both its affective and material dimensions. Likewise, we look forward to scholarly work that privileges intersectional perspectives on questions of urban emplacement and ‘settling down’ of particularly vulnerable individuals and groups in the post-migrant city.

#4 Architectures of containment and governance: displacement, extractivism, and city-making

Session chair(s):

Ayse Caglar (University of Vienna), Paolo Novak

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This session seeks to trace the deep histories and afterlives of spaces of containment—from sites of coerced and confined labor to centers for asylum seekers, detention facilities, and deportation infrastructures in cities. By bringing together diverse cases, the session aims to critically examine sites of containment that have been repurposed multiple times, often marked by coercion, discipline, violence, and racial hierarchies. We are particularly interested in interrogating how these regimes intersect with various forms of extractivism and the experiences of displaced people including contestation in cities of various scale.

Studies on the governance and management of human mobility have increasingly highlighted the institutional and structural apparatuses underpinning mobility regimes and bordering dynamics, deepening our understanding of both the processes of displacement and the lived experiences of the displaced. Technologies, policies, and legal frameworks—together with the narratives that frame mobility—have proven crucial in revealing how governance mechanisms simultaneously enable and constrain movement, while reinforcing social, political, and territorial boundaries. Yet, despite the significance of this “mobility turn,” research has often overlooked the dynamics and actors involved in the containment of the displaced and the connection of these urban spaces to the circuits of capital. While there is a growing interest in the privatization of “care” and the management of displaced populations, relatively little attention has been given to the spatial arrangements of containment themselves—their built environments, infrastructures, architectures, and especially the historical trajectories that have shaped these urban spaces.

This session calls for papers addressing that gap by tracing the longue durée of spaces of containment—from sites of forced and confined labor to asylum seeker reception centers and detention and deportation facilities in cities located in different parts of the world. By exploring the historically produced infrastructures, logistical systems, and their changing assemblage of actors that give these spaces their “afterlives,” the workshop aims to bring together empirical research on the scalar configurations of (im)mobility governance at the intersections of state, capital and labor in city making Some of the questions we seek to explore include:

• How the built environment, architecture, and spatial arrangements shape the experiences of displaced people in cities of various scale;
• The ways these spaces enable discipline, control, surveillance, and the reinforcement of racial hierarchies;
• How such sites are connected to changing forms of extractivism within the shifting dynamics of capitalism and cities;
• How the spatial organizations of these sites interact with broader regimes of confinement, labor exploitation, and the invisibilization of violence.

South-North-East-West dialogues; Built-environments; Governance; Migration; Recent developments in theory

#5 Organized Crime and the Production of Unequal City

Session chair(s):

Thiago Canettieri (Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)), Priscila Coli (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)), Taís Clark (Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG))

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Urban studies literature has historically paid limited attention to the role of criminal organizations (COs) in shaping urban life. Yet in many cities worldwide, these groups produce housing, provide basic infrastructure, regulate markets, and impose their own forms of order. Their role is not only parasitic but also productive, generating particular modes of urbanization, driving environmental degradation, fostering unequal forms of urban citizenship, and reshaping social organization around collective goods and rights, as recent studies from different disciplines have shown. Examples include Brazil’s territory-making milícias (Coli, 2025), sectarian armed groups in Baghdad (Windhauser, 2022), Lebanon’s religious militias (Bou Akar, 2018), Medellín’s narco-urbanism (Moncada, 2016), and Mumbai’s development mafias (Weinstein, 2008).

This panel invites contributions from a wide range of disciplines to examine the multifaceted role of criminal groups as “urbanization actors” who directly shape urban form and everyday life. We seek to expand debates on the engagement of criminal organizations in urbanization by exploring how their practices foster new inequalities or deepen existing ones in cities of the Global South and North. By focusing on peripheral and marginalized areas, the panel aims to bring criminal governance into the lens of urban studies, demonstrating that any account of contemporary urbanization must grapple with the interplay between state, civic, market, and criminal actors.

Key questions we aim to explore include:

Criminal Governance: How do criminal organizations regulate land use, provide (or extort) services, and enforce systems of justice in ways that reinforce or produce inequality?

Everyday Life among Criminal Normativity: How does everyday life in territories dominated by criminal actors reflect and reproduce unequal forms of citizenship and belonging?

Illicit Economies & Urban Development: In what ways do illicit economies drive uneven urban development and shape access to housing, infrastructure, and commercial spaces?

Control and Dispossession: How is control (i.e. territorial control) mobilized to produce spatial exclusion, dispossession, and new urban hierarchies?

Citizenship and Belonging: How do residents navigate overlapping normative regimes to claim rights, build communities, and contest inequality?

Environmental Justice and Degradation: How do criminal organizations shape patterns of environmental harm and access to resources—such as land, water, waste, or green spaces—and what are the implications for environmental justice and inequality in cities?

We welcome papers that engage with one or more of the themes outlined above. While theoretical contributions are valued, our primary emphasis is on empirically grounded research that clearly demonstrates the connections between criminal activity and urban inequality. By bringing together studies from diverse disciplines—including but not limited to sociology, urban studies and planning, anthropology, geography, and political science—and from a range of urban contexts, this panel seeks to foster a comparative discussion that is both necessary and methodologically challenging. Through this multidisciplinary and empirically oriented approach, we aim to question conventional analytical frameworks and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how urban inequalities are produced, contested, and experienced in cities.

#6 Gated Enclaves, Private Education, Land Speculation: Heightened Inequality in Global Urban Margins

Session chair(s):

Ishita Chatterjee (O. P. Jindal Global University), Minati Dash, Smriti Singh

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This session invites scholars to critically analyse the nexus of education, land, and inequality at urban margins. We use urban margins as a productive spatial trope, referring to sites of new urbanisation dynamics, peripheral urban spaces, the violence of urban inequality, and the contested politics of capitalist expansion (Gillespie & Mercer, 2025). Particularly since the neo-liberal turn, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have emerged as key players in these transformations, actively engaging in speculative urbanism as landowners, developers, and major real estate holders in cities and their peripheries (Bagchi, 2021). The focus on the urban margin is critical because these areas represent the ‘emergent pattern of urbanisation’ across the globe, especially in Global South countries, where they defy the urban-rural dichotomy and operate as contested sites of accumulation and agrarian-urban entanglement driven by speculative real estate and infrastructural corridors.

Education is increasingly being treated as a private commodity rather than a public service, allowing HEIs to pursue institutional expansion by accumulating real estate assets and leveraging their symbolic status to attract investment. Whether operating as ‘anchor institutions’ in urban development, regeneration (Melhuish, 2015; Perry, Wiewel & Menendez, 2009) or ‘corridor urbanisation’ in peripheral, peri-urban regions (Balakrishnan, 2013; 2018), universities are actively producing new forms of segregated spaces. University’s role as a real estate developer is achieved through the securitisation, surveillance, and policing of space, reinforcing a racial-capitalist logics and exclusionary spatial practices (Baldwin, 2021).
This university-led restructuring creates deep social and spatial inequalities often interlinked with gentrification, displacement, and social exclusion. In the Global South (e.g., South Asia), this process takes the form of ‘agrarian urbanism’, where the conversion of fertile land for ‘enclosed elite private education zones’ leads to the dispossession of local agrarian communities. The low-income residents are subjected to a two-tier policing system or pushed out by rising housing costs driven by universities’ accommodation needs. Locals are frequently relegated to precarious, low-paid informal work within the new enclaves, becoming culturally and socially alienated from the emerging ‘knowledge economy’. Elite private institutions globally systematically reinforce hierarchies of privilege, where access is managed through gatekeeping systems that favour students based on race, class, ethnicity, and social status.

This session invites comparative and situated studies that interrogate how HEIs act as urban actors in urban margins and exacerbate inequalities across varied political economies. We invite submissions from diverse disciplines and specifically encourage independent researchers, social workers, activists, practitioners, policymakers, industry professionals, and academics to participate. Related topics include -
1. Comparative analyses of the university-land market nexus in urban frontiers in diverse global settings
2. Socio-spatial exclusion and displacement in urban and peri-urban areas through university-led urbanisation
3. The role of the state and policies rationalised through private educational expansion (e.g., as 'public purpose') or leveraged (e.g., developmental state strategies) to facilitate university accumulation
4. Examine the undermining of rights and access to space by the creation of segregated, corporate academic spaces.
5. The impact of education commodification on equity and access within academic institutions, considering race, class, caste, and gender

#7 The housing-wealth-nexus. Inequality in the age of rentier capitalism

Session chair(s):

Agustín Cocola-Gant (Rovira i Virgili University), Sonia Vives-Miró, Georgia Alexandri

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

The overarching aim of this session is to explore how the consolidation of housing as a key asset for storing and generating wealth is deepening inequalities between property owners and non-owners. Over recent decades, property ownership has become a central pillar of wealth accumulation for both households and institutional investors, with rising housing prices serving as a major driver of financial gains. However, while some individuals and institutions have expanded their property portfolios, evidence shows a simultaneous growth in the number of households without any property at all. This dual trend underscores a widening gap between landlords and tenants—an inequality particularly visible in the current context of generation rent. Escalating house prices, restrictive mortgage access, and stagnant wages have collectively diminished homeownership opportunities, especially for younger generations. As a result, increasing numbers are confined to the private rental sector, facing conditions that make it ever more difficult to transition to ownership. Moreover, the structure of the rental market—where tenants continuously transfer income to landlords—functions as a mechanism of upward wealth redistribution, reinforcing social hierarchies and constraining the well-being and life trajectories of those excluded from ownership.

In light of these dynamics, this session invites research papers and theoretical contributions addressing the following key themes:

Wealth Extraction from Housing
Who are the key actors extracting wealth from housing, and through which mechanisms? To what extent is household wealth increasingly derived from rentier practices? Which assets and real estate products—such as private rentals, short-term and temporary accommodations, or buy-to-leave investments, among others—are being used for wealth accumulation, and by whom?

Wealth Inequality and Intersectionality
How does property ownership contribute to wealth inequality, and how are these disparities mediated by class, gender, race, and age? In what ways does housing function as a driver of impoverishment and social stratification? How is generation rent experiencing economic and social exclusion within increasingly financialised housing systems? What are the spatial logics of housing-related inequalities?

Alternative Futures
What policy measures could reassert housing’s social function and curb speculative investment? Which strategies and interventions can effectively reduce housing inequalities and enhance affordability?

#8 Rethinking the ‘European city’: land financialisation, wealth accumulation and the production of new urban inequalities

Session chair(s):

Veronica Conte (KU Leuven), Johanna Lilius, Georgia Alexandri

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

European cities have long been regarded as forms of compromise and aggregation of interests, and as political arenas in which different actors negotiate the urban future, within a framework rooted in the provision of social services (Le Galès 2002). However, in the wake of financial, energy and geopolitical crises, the redefinition of the state’s role in land development and the reallocation of public resources towards military expenditure have put a strain on European cities, raising questions about whether urban governance can sustain welfare provision while promoting economic growth.

Emerging literature identifies European cities as key sites for the financialisation of land, urban planning, and housing (Holm et al. 2023; Ward 2021; Savini and Aalbers 2016), where the treatment of land as a financial asset serves the broader economic objectives of rentier capitalism. Despite the variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, four points recur: i) at the heart of land market transformations lies the potential of land to create novel values and generate steady income streams for its owners; ii) state policies and regulatory frameworks are indispensable for the functioning of land markets, prompting renewed attention to land politics; iii) recent shifts in land markets foster new forms of wealth accumulation while triggering expulsions, displacement, and novel forms of dispossession; iv) all this intensifies existing urban inequalities and produces new ones, which are intertwined with intergenerational inequalities in wealth transfer and other forms of discrimination based on race, class and gender.

The objective of this session is to interrogate how European cities are being reshaped by new pressures on land. Following Robinson’s call for a more plural and situated urban theory, we welcome case studies and comparative works examining how recent transformations in land markets and politics contribute to the production of urban inequalities. To value Europe’s contextual specificities, we invite contributions from various regional settings and often-overlooked contexts such as shrinking, small and medium-sized cities. We furthermore invite to rethink the European city ‘through elsewhere’ (Robinson 2015), challenging our understanding of the dynamics that lead to urban transformation and considering how these influence urban trajectories in the Global South and beyond.

We welcome submissions addressing the questions below and other interconnected issues:
- Who are the actors driving transformations in European land markets and shaping patterns of ownership, access, and use?
- Through what mechanisms are land markets governed and regulated, and how are these mechanisms changing?
- What new state–market relations emerge from these transformations?
- Which forms of resistance, contestation, and collective action are challenging dominant land politics?
- How do inequalities in land ownership, control and access intersect with intergenerational dynamics and other forms of discrimination based on class, race and gender?
- What new forms of displacement and dispossession are urbanites experiencing in the current conjuncture?
- Which conceptual frameworks, or combinations thereof, best capture ongoing transformations: financialisation, assetisation, commodification, or others?

#9 Wealth and the city: Urban territories and spatial trajectories of the economic elite

Session chair(s):

Bruno Cousin (Sciences Po), Rowland Atkinson, Mikael Holmqvist

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This session invites papers focusing on groups and spaces related to the top of the socio-economic ladder, the upper-middle and upper classes, and on those with significant economic power and wealth. We welcome papers detailing the dynamics of urban concentration, self-segregation, spatial mobility, and multi-territoriality, as well as the ways economic elites make sense of urban space practically and symbolically.

All papers – quantitative, qualitative or mixed-methods – should be based on solid empirical evidence and explore the causes, modes and/or effects of the spatiality of the rich, super-rich or economically powerful. Papers may therefore also allow analyses at the intersection between urban and regional studies and other social scientific subfields of investigation. For instance, colleagues working on the expansion and further upgrading of elite spaces as driving forces of the reconfiguration of the entire socio-spatial mosaic of the metropolis they study, or focusing on the relation between super-gentrification and financialization of housing, or measuring the effects of the spatial concentration of certain economic sectors or high-skilled professions in specific areas, or showing how the self-segregation and multi-territorial habits of the wealthy can help describe and define them as geo-social classes with peculiar relations to the biosphere, would all be of great interest.

We are indeed interested in understanding the spatial dimension of all inequality processes that originate close to or at the very top. Similarly, in terms of theory, we - of course - welcome a variety of analytical paradigms where this work is supported by an empirical demonstration.

#10 The digital frontier

Session chair(s):

Ayona Datta (University College London), Justus Uitermark (University of Amsterdam)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This session explores digitization in motion and across space. It examines how digital technologies—from artificial intelligence and social media platforms to digital archives—enter into and transform previously analogue life worlds and domains.

Research on digital urbanism shows that corporations and governments deploy digital technologies to expand control, extract data, and commodify social life. From dating to volunteering, and from taxi rides to land registration, digital infrastructures enable the extension of corporate and governmental power deep into everyday life. This session asks how places, institutions, and relationships are reconfigured through such technologies.

We understand this digital reconfiguration through the notion of the digital frontier. The frontier metaphor highlights processes of expansion: digital technologies enumerate subjects once uncountable, render visible territories once unmapped, and organize political, economic, and social relations previously outside digital grids.

Yet this frontier is not simply a divide between advanced and primitive, or formal and informal. While structural parallels with colonial frontiers remain, today’s digital frontiers emerge in a different historical moment and within new constellations of power. Colonial dynamics persist, but in a postcolonial and multipolar world where American and European hegemony is waning. Power relations are often complex: workers or residents sometimes resist digitization but at other times embrace it. While platforms’ logics of extraction, commodification, and control permeate social worlds, their advance is never smooth or uniform: wherever digital technologies expand, their operations are contested, reshaped, and transformed.

We invite submissions that examine the digital frontier in different geographical contexts and domains. From the contention over viral food spots or wanghong attractions to disputes over land registration and gig work: we are interested in exploring a wide range of cases to examine general dynamics as well as variations and particularities. We are open to all methods, ranging from computational analyses that chart digital inequalities to deep ethnographies that explore digitization in place, and from cartographic methods that map uneven digitization across space to action research.

#11 Invisible Citizens: Experiencing and Resisting Exclusion in the Contemporary City

Session chair(s):

Anna Domaradzka (University od Warsaw), Nina Wroblewska

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Cities are places of complex coexistence, where people from different social, cultural, and cognitive backgrounds come together in shared public spaces (Fincher and Iveson 2008, Gehl 2010). Unfortunately, these spaces are not always adapted to the needs of all city residents. Many people experience forms of exclusion that remain invisible to policymakers, urban planners, and researchers (Soja 2010, Wilson and Tewdwr-Jones 2021). These 'hidden inequalities' can manifest in various ways, including cognitive or sensory exclusion (Imrie 2011), as well as more visible economic, social, or spatial barriers (Lefebvre 1991, Young 1990).

Some urban citizens are more prone to become ‘invisible’ – this includes neuroatypical individuals, people with disabilities or mental health issues, women, elderly, members of LGBTQ+ community, migrants, unhoused people and other minorities and equity-seeking groups (Hamraie 2017, Kitchin 1998). Their exclusion is not always overt or intentional, yet it often becomes embedded in the infrastructure, services, and discourses that shape the city (Fainstein 2010, Harvey 2008). This can lead to subtle but profound limitations in navigating public space, accessing city services, participating in policymaking and feeling a sense of belonging (Mitchell 2003).

Growing social, economic, and environmental challenges are increasing the urgency of addressing these forms of inequality (UN-Habitat 2020). Urban expansion, population shifts into major cities, digital transformation, and climate change are reshaping urban life in ways that increase the vulnerability of groups already at risk of exclusion (Anguelovski et al. 2018, Blokland et al. 2015). Research shows that diversity and the inclusion of disadvantaged groups are not only matters of social justice, but also essential for building more resilient, democratic, and innovative urban environments (Fainstein 2010, Meerow et al. 2016, Soja 2010).

This session aims to create a space for dialogue on how hidden inequalities are produced and experienced, as well as how they are addressed or resisted. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary perspectives and case studies from different geographical, political and ethnical contexts, especially those that are rarely represented in mainstream academic discourse.

We invite authors using diverse theoretical approaches including, but not restricted to: social construction of disability, theories of spatial justice and right to the city, conflict theory, postcolonial theory, indigenous studies or social exclusion and marginality theory. We encourage contributions engaging with concepts like human agency, narratives, spatial and digital practices, cultural representations, and similar.

We aim to address following questions:

1. How ‘invisible’ forms of exclusion manifest in different urban contexts?
2. In what ways do policies, planning practices, or public discourses reproduce the invisibility of vulnerable groups?
3. How do vulnerable groups resist, negotiate, or reconfigure urban inequalities in their everyday lives?
4. What are the spatial and social – both collective and individual – strategies used by excluded groups striving for safety, privacy, health and well-being in the urban context?
5. What methodological or theoretical approaches are best suited to making ‘hidden’ experiences visible in urban research?

#12 Claiming space: artistic practices, care and resistance in neoliberal cities

Session chair(s):

Marianna d'Ovidio (Università di Milano-Bicocca), Emanuela Naclerio

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Over the past decades, cultural production and the so-called creative industries have been celebrated as catalysts of urban growth, innovation and competitiveness, yet also criticised for their complicity in processes of displacement, gentrification and for deepening inequalities. In the neoliberal cities, the nexus between culture and urban development has often been shaped by logics of extraction and commodification, often exacerbating dynamics of exclusion. However, cultural, creative and artistic interventions have emerged as potential catalysts of resistance, care and solidarity, offering new ways of inhabiting and imagining contemporary urban environments. Mobilizing a variety of bodies, different and subvertive subjectivities, new or unexpected alliances and powerful imaginaries, artistic initiatives have been engaging in enabling more just, inclusive, and sustainable urban futures. At the same time these practices are exposed to the risk of being instrumentalised, co-opted or neutralised by dominant urban forces.

By bringing together diverse perspectives, this panel aims to critically explore artistic practices and interventions in contemporary cities as forms of resistance, care, conviviality and contestation, that challenge the extractivist logic, reclaim spaces and experiment with alternative imaginaries of social life. Moreover, the panel examines those bottom-up artistic practices that focus on care, both in its ethical and political dimension, in contesting urban inequalities, feeding communities and cultivating spaces of solidarity.

We welcome empirical case studies, comparative perspectives, and conceptual or theoretical reflections. We invite contributions engaging with a wide range of methods, theories, and approaches that may address, but are not limited to, the following key themes and research questions:

- Bottom-up artistic placemaking and its role in challenging urban inequalities.
- Grassroots artistic practices’ interventions in urban spaces and their relation with the urban governance.
- The roles that artistic initiatives - stemming from culture, arts or creative industries - play in resisting or/and reconfiguring models of urban development.
- Art-based interventions’ articulation of alternative imaginaries of communities, belongings and care.
- The mobilisation of care to sustain solidarity practices and to subvert the dominant urban logics.
- The ambivalent and conflicting nature of bottom-up alternative practices when they are taken up, supported, or co-opted by institutional actors.
- The ecological contribution of grassroots artistic initiatives, particularly in terms of alternative economies, resource reuse, and post-growth imaginaries.

#13 Inequalities in Urban Walkability: Vulnerabilities, Policies, and Mobilizations

Session chair(s):

Eliott Ducharme (Université Gustave Eiffel), Jérôme Monnet, Martha De Alba

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Long overlooked in research and public policy, walking in urban areas is beginning to emerge as a major issue, as the need to rethink urban models to make them more sustainable becomes urgent (Demailly et al., 2021).

However, as walking emerges on political agendas, many aspects are still insufficiently considered. Policies promoting pedestrian areas tend to focus on city centers and commercial zones, often neglecting the outskirts (Monnet, 2022). Walking practices also suffer from the historical bias in the design of circulation spaces, which were primarily conceived by and for able-bodied, young, and active men. The specific needs of women, people with disabilities, children, and the elderly are not yet sufficiently considered (McFarlane, 2021; Valdivia, 2018). These groups tend to rely on walking and often travel in difficult conditions (Herrmann-Lunecke et al., 2020; Middleton, 2022).

Due to a lack of investment in pedestrian infrastructure, disadvantaged urban residents are forced to walk in unpleasant and dangerous conditions (Figueroa Martínez, 2023). Poorly maintained sidewalks, exposure to pollution and insecurity shape their walking experience (Martínez, 2019). Such inequalities are most apparent in the Global South, but are also present in the Global North, where they tend to be less visible. This call for papers is structured around three themes:

Issue 1. Factors contributing to vulnerability when walking in cities.
Recent studies have challenged traditional approaches to “walkability,” which focus too heavily on infrastructure, and have highlighted the wide range of factors that hinder walking and increase the vulnerability of certain population groups (Battista & Manaugh, 2018; Middleton, 2022). This theme seeks to foster dialogue around the diverse and intersecting factors that create vulnerability in walking practices. It focuses in particular on the issue of intersectionality (Jirón et al., 2023) and the articulation of different aspects of urban production (social, material, symbolic) in the creation of socio-spatial inequalities.

Issue 2. New methodologies for understanding experienced inequalities.
Recent approaches to mobility inequalities have emphasized the lived of experience of urban dwellers (Avilés, 2020; Martínez, 2019). Understanding inequalities through the embodied experience of walking requires the development of new methodologies: approaches such as the go-along (Kusenbach, 2003), sombreo (Jirón, 2012), travel diaries (Lazo Corvalán et al., 2024), mental maps created in focus groups (Ducharme, 2025), and many others have emerged in recent years. This theme calls on authors to present their methodological innovations and related questions.

Issue 3. Public policies and citizen mobilization
Issues related to walking for the most vulnerable city dwellers are beginning to give rise to public policies, some of which are innovative. One example is the “Senderos seguros: camina libre, camina segura” project, which was implemented in the municipality of Iztapalapa (Mexico City) and subsequently extended to the rest of the metropolis. We invite contributions that critically analyze such emerging policies.
Civil society is also beginning to address the issue of inequalities related to walking. Numerous NGOs are developing around this issue, and mobilizations are springing up. We are interested in work analyzing these mobilizations, their actors, and their modes of action.

#14 Inaction under Risk: Inequality and the Politics of Urban Safety

Session chair(s):

Ebru Tekin Bilbil (Ozyegin University)

Format type:

Innovative Session: Method Stations

Description:

Urban transformation initiatives in hazardous zones often assume that information and economic incentives suffice to motivate relocation or retrofitting. Yet, empirically, many residents remain in known-risk housing. This session probes that disjunction: it asks how inequalities in material resources, symbolic attachments to place, and distrust in institutional authority mediate the uptake of transformation incentives. Rather than treating residents as passive recipients of messaging, we situate them as interpretive actors working under constraints and meanings.

By foregrounding the political, temporal, and discursive dimensions of risk governance, the session directly addresses how difference, power, and urban inequality shape the production and reception of policies in the city. The purpose is not simply to explain non-uptake but to re-theorize incentive design as a domain of cultural negotiation, not just economic calculus.
The critical urban literature has long cautioned against rationalist assumptions that equate awareness with action. More recent work in disaster studies demonstrates the limited leverage of framing interventions in contexts where local preferences and distrust are strong.

Empirically, our Istanbul-based mixed-methods research substantiates this: a survey experiment deploying three incentive framings (loss, neutral, gain) produced no significant overall effect. Income stratification, rather than framing, emerged as the dominant predictor of willingness to participate. Among higher-income households only, we observed a divergence: loss-framed incentives increased uptake, whereas gain-framed incentives reduced it. Qualitative work revealed emergent themes: residents expressed strong attachments to property, neighborhood continuity, and dignity; some policies were rejected not for lack of financial appeal but because they clashed with assumptions about agency and status. Patterns of skepticism toward contractors and state agents also surfaced repeatedly.

The session will be conducted as follows:
1. Live Mini-Experiment (20 min): Participants are randomly assigned one of the three framings and asked to choose whether they would “participate” in transformation. Real-time visualization of responses sparks immediate reflexivity.
2. Gallery Walk of Mixed Evidence (20 min): Graphs, charts, and selected qualitative extracts (narratives, stakeholder quotes) are displayed. Participants move through spatial stations, annotate, and engage in peer dialog.
3. Rotating Small-Group Dialogue (30 min): Groups rotate across thematic stations prompting reflection on key tensions: What intervenes in the chain? What limits residents in low-resource conditions? How do attachments, place, and distrust reshape incentives?
4. Plenary Reflexive Synthesis (20–30 min): The session chair juxtapose audience responses and Istanbul findings, guiding comparative reflection across cities’ political-economic terrains.

The goal is to co-produce design heuristics for incentive architectures that are attentive to inequality and meaning. It challenges narrow behavioral framings by reconceptualizing incentives as sites of symbolic negotiation and structural constraint. It demonstrates how ostensibly “null” experimental results can be generative when coupled with qualitative depth and interactive formats. Also, it compels rethinking transformation programs not merely as technical interventions, but as contested socio-political projects that must grapple with urban inequality, legitimacy, and the politics of recognition.

#15 Rethinking the Urban Home: Self-Help Housing Re/constructions and Contemporary Challenges

Session chair(s):

Slavomíra Ferenčuhová (Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences), Terezie Lokšová

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This session invites contributions to discuss self-help housing constructions and reconstructions and do-it-yourself (DIY) housing renovations as practices and strategies with significant societal relevance. Drawing on previous scholarship (e.g., Grubbauer, 2015), we approach home reconstructions undertaken by non-experts as more than isolated household projects; we view them as forms of intervention into urban space and life. Specifically, we aim to contextualize DIY construction and reconstruction within pressing contemporary challenges, including housing unaffordability, climate change impacts, and energy insecurity. The session will address critical questions such as: Do self-help housing re/constructions represent viable responses to such challenges in cities worldwide, how successful are they, and how are these practices performed, negotiated, and interpreted by those who undertake them?

We welcome submissions that offer empirical insights from diverse geographical and historical contexts, encompassing cities and peri-urban areas, alongside theoretical discussions and conceptual debates. The session is open to a variety of perspectives with no specific methodological or theoretical preferences, reflecting our observation that self-help housing re/constructions are significantly understudied in urban scholarship despite their promising potential for critical insights. The session welcomes comparative discussions, whether across multiple papers or within individual contributions.

The sub-themes of the session include, but are not limited to, exploring interconnections between self-help housing re/constructions and:

• Climate change adaptation and mitigation
• Environmental aspects and sustainability
• Energy consumption and energy in/security
• Domestic politics and household relationships
• Housing un/affordability, economic aspects, and inequality
• Consumption, maintenance, and repair economies
• Materiality of the house and building practices
• Everyday practices of home-making and dwelling
• History of self-help housing reconstructions
• Cultural meanings and interpretation of DIY housing

References:
Grubbauer, M. (2015). Not everything is new in DIY: Home remodelling by amateurs as urban practice. Ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 15(1): 141-162.

#16 Aging with Dignity: Supporting Aging Behaviours Through Sustainable Urbanism

Session chair(s):

Sravanti Peri (National University of Singapore)

Format type:

Innovative session: Co-Innovation - Let’s Design Aging Together

Description:

Theme: Intergenerational Urbanism: Aging is frequently framed narrowly as the final stage of life, resulting in environments, design practices, and policies that marginalise or exclude older adults. This theme reframes aging as a shared, intergenerational experience shaped by socio-spatial contexts and regulatory landscapes, examining how urban environments influence and support aging across the life course.

1. Session Format (Co-Innovation - Let’s Design Aging Together): A hands-on, interactive session where participants explore urban aging challenges and co-design inclusive, actionable solutions using insights, snapshots, and prototyping tools.

2. Session Overview: Focusing on the theme of Intergenerational Urbanism, this session engages participants in co-innovating and designing aging together. Building on ethnographic observations of Singapore’s wet markets and India’s rythu bazaars, the session shares key insights into how everyday contexts influence aging behaviours and participation. These findings are enriched with behavioural theories to provide a grounded understanding of aging in urban spaces. Complementing this, a critical mapping of global and national (Singapore & India) regulatory landscapes has identified opportunities and gaps for integrating aging into sustainable urbanism. Together, these insights, along with findings from thematic snapshots, set the foundation for an interactive co-design board game where participants collaboratively generate strategies for sustainable, inclusive, and intergenerational urban environments. Participants will leave with actionable strategies to reimagine aging as a shared experience shaped by urban environments.

3. Session Plan (120 mins):
a. Introduction and Context (20 mins)
- Overview of aging in urban environments, relevance to inequalities, and session objectives.
- Observational Insights: Key themes from Singapore’s wet markets and India’s rythu bazaars.
- Critical Mapping Insights: Key findings from global and national (Singapore & India) regulatory landscapes.

b. Thematic Snapshots (2 to 3 ideas as a poster or mini presentation – 25 mins)
- Focus: Thematic linking of aging, urban environment, and inequality.
- Each presenter: 5-minute input (idea or case).
- Discussions: Connecting participant themes with observational and critical mapping insights.

c. Hands-on Co-Design Workshop (60 mins)
- Interactive activity using the prototype board game “How Do You Want to Age? Design Your Own Journey.”
- Collaboratively explore lived experiences and intergenerational needs to co-design sustainable urban environments supporting aging behaviours.

d. Reflection and Discussion (15 mins)
- Synthesise insights from observations, critical mapping, thematic snapshots, and workshop outcomes.
- Key takeaways for age-inclusive sustainable urbanism.

4. Session Objectives:
- Explore how urban environments can support aging as a shared, intergenerational experience by integrating observational insights, critical mapping insights, and thematic snapshots.
- Engage participants in a co-design workshop to generate inclusive, actionable strategies for sustainable urbanism that support aging behaviours.
- Foster interdisciplinary dialogue bridging theory, design, policy, and practice in age-inclusive urbanism.

5. Target Audience: Academics, industry professionals, healthcare professionals, policymakers, practitioners, designers, researchers, students, community stakeholders, and anyone who views aging as a meaningful, ongoing life journey and is interested in co-creating inclusive, age-friendly urban environments.

#17 Climate adaptation from below: community-led responses to environmental challenges in the Global South

Session chair(s):

Francesca Ferlicca (Sciences Po Urban School), Sonia Roitman, Jakub Galuszka

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Session Description
Cities in the Global South face disproportionate impacts from climate change, environmental degradation, and extreme weather events, often exacerbating existing urban inequalities. While top-down climate adaptation strategies dominate policy discourse, grassroots initiatives led by communities, neighbourhood organizations, and informal networks represent crucial yet underrepresented responses to environmental challenges within the mainstream discussion to environmental challenges. These community-led adaptations emerge from the lived experiences of urban residents confronting daily environmental risks, from flooding in informal settlements to heat stress in dense urban areas.

This session explores how communities in the Global South develop strategies for climate adaptation, challenging traditional narratives that position marginalized urban populations solely as vulnerable victims rather than active agents of change. We examine how these bottom-up initiatives intersect with, complement, or contest formal adaptation policies, revealing tensions between community knowledge and institutional approaches.

Key themes and research questions we invite include:

• Theoretical frameworks: How do community-led adaptation practices challenge and offer alternatives to dominant paradigms dominant climate governance paradigms? What theoretical lenses (from urban studies, development studies,
environmentaljustice,decolonial theory) best capture these dynamics?
• Methodological approaches: How can researchers and communities ethically document and analyze community-led initiatives? What participatory methodologies reveal community adaptation knowledge? How do we avoid extractive research practices?
• Spatial dimensions: How do informal settlements, peripheral neighborhoods, and marginalized urban areas develop place-specific adaptation strategies? What role do urban informality, precarity, and spatial inequalities play in shaping community responses? What are the counter-productive effects of top-down approaches that use climate adaptation as an excuse to relocate communities? How can communities challenge resettlement paradigms through innovative in-situ solutions that question conventional imperatives around flood zones and other environmental risk areas while maintaining their social networks and territorial attachments?
• Social networks and organizing: What forms of collective action, solidarity, and mutual aid and support emerge around environmental challenges? How do gender, ethnicity, class, disabilty and migration status influence participation in adaptation initiatives?
• Knowledge systems: How do communities combine traditional ecological knowledge, everyday experiences, and external resources? What tensions arise between local and experiential knowledge and technical expertise?
• Policy interfaces: How do community initiatives engage with, resist, or remain invisible to formal governance structures? What opportunities exist for scaling up or institutionalizing community-led practices?
• Cross-regional perspectives: How do community adaptation strategies vary across different contexts in the Global South (Latin America, Africa, Asia and Asia Pacific)? What comparative insights emerge from diverse urban environments?

We welcome contributions from various disciplines including urban studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, and development studies. We encourage papers based on ethnographic research, participatory methods, action research, and comparative approaches. We particularly seek contributions that center community voices and experiences while critically examining power dynamics in climate adaptation processes.
This session aims to foster comparative discussions about community agency in environmental governance, contributing to broader debates about urban inequalities, environmental justice, and alternative pathways for sustainable urban development in the Global South.

#18 Urban Subjectivities in Platform Labour: Class, Precarity, and Everyday Experiences of the Digital City

Session chair(s):

Francisco Fernández-Trujillo Moares (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Ana Santamarina

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This panel seeks to examine the subjective and urban dimensions of platform capitalism by focusing on the ways in which workers narrate, embody, and negotiate their experiences in the city. Moving beyond the analysis of material labour conditions, our aim is to foreground how discourses, imaginaries, and lived experiences around platformisation are articulated in relation to urban space, housing and class.

The platform economy has become a central force in reconfiguring the everyday life of cities, producing new forms of spatiality and temporality (Srnicek, 2017; van Doorn, 2020). Workers’ subjectivities are shaped not only by their employment relations but also by how they inhabit the urban fabric and make use of – and reshape – public space: from streets, sidewalks, and squares as sites of labour, to housing arrangements marked by overcrowding, insecurity, or long commuting times. The city emerges here as both a resource and a constraint, mediating the contradictions between workers’ aspirations for autonomy and flexibility, and their lived experiences of precarity and fragmentation (Harvey, 2012; Fraser, 2016).

This panel invites contributions that consider how these subjectivities intersect with broader social positions and intersectional inequalities. While platformisation appears as a transversal phenomenon across social classes, the most precarised groups—migrant, racialised, and feminised workers—are at the centre of its contradictions. Their voices highlight how urban inequalities are reproduced through platform labour, but also how new forms of belonging, collective identification, and claims to the city emerge (van Doorn & Glöss, 2021; Cant, 2019). By situating these narratives within the urban context, we seek to illuminate the spatial and subjective dimensions of precarity, as well as the tensions between entrepreneurial discourses promoted by platforms and the lived realities of dispossession and constraint.

Central themes for this panel include:

• The articulation of labour subjectivities and urban identities in platform work.
• Housing struggles, precarious dwelling, and the spatialisation of inequality.
• The use and transformation of public space as a site of platform labour.
• Class, migration, racialisation, and gender as axes of subjectivation.
• Contradictions between aspiration, autonomy, and precarity in the digital city.

By exploring these questions, the panel aims to contribute to an understanding of how platform capitalism is not only reorganising labour but also reshaping urban life and subjectivities. In doing so, we address the broader implications of the “digital city” as a terrain of conflict, aspiration, and negotiation (Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018; Sequera & Nofre, 2020).

#19 The End of Post? Rethinking Urban Practices and Structures and Their Impact on Inequalities in Post-Socialist and Post-Industrial Cities

Session chair(s):

Yvonne Franz (University of Vienna), Harutyun Vermishyan

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

(How) can the concept of the post-socialist city continue to provide an innovative analytical lens through which to understand new and old socio-spatial inequalities? More than three decades after the collapse of socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe, the concept of the post-socialist city remains a central yet contested framework for urban studies. While it has enabled scholars to trace the enduring legacies of state socialism in urban governance, spatial organization, and socio-economic structures, it also risks simplifying a transitional narrative that overlooks the evolving complexities of everyday urban life and local economy as well as the differences of perception amongst various societal generations in these regions.

Several authors have challenged the temporal and ideological assumptions embedded in the ‘post-‘prefix, calling for either abandoning (Müller and Trubina 2020) or reinventing it (Ringel 2022). Slaev and Hirt (2022) have argued for a nuanced understanding of planning cultures in post-socialist contexts. Similarly, Hirt (2013) has highlighted the hybrid nature shaped by both neoliberal reforms and residual socialist structures, which merit continued academic engagement with the ‘post-‘prefix. Also, Chelcea (2025) sees a strength in pluralistic, open-ended understandings of post-socialism. Key concerns are questions of autonomy and dependency as well as an underdeveloped dialogue between the g/Global E/east and g/Global W/west. Investigations into transnational capital flows and how they shape urban futures in post-socialist regions (see Aruri 2024) are still very much needed.

This panel welcomes innovative contributions exploring how Southeastern and Eastern European cities are embedded in transnational networks of finance, infrastructure, and policy, and how these relationships may reproduce socio-spatial inequalities. We particularly encourage sociological perspectives that address questions of inequality, identity, everyday practices, and the lived experience of urban change. This includes reflecting on the role of civic initiatives, grassroots movements, and alternative (people-centred) planning practices in shaping more inclusive and sustainable urban futures. We invite innovative contributions that critically engage with the post-socialist condition and emphasize the importance of local knowledge and community engagement in resisting top-down planning and fostering spatial justice (see Perić and Maruna (2022)) or explore comparisons with other conditions of ‘post’.

References:
Natasha Aruri, Katleen De Flander, & Andreas Brück, (Eds.) (2024) Critical Mapping for Municipalist Mobilization: Housing Struggles in Belgrade, Berlin, Barcelona. Berlin: Berlin Universities Publishing.
Liviu Chelcea (2025) Goodbye, post-socialism? Stranger things beyond the Global East, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 66:7, 874-900, DOI: 10.1080/15387216.2023.2236126
Sonia Hirt (2013) Whatever happened to the (post) socialist city? Cities, 32, 29-S38, DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2013.04.010
Martin Müller & Elena Trubina (2020) The Global Easts in global urbanism: views from beyond North and South, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 61:6, 627-635, DOI: 10.1080/15387216.2020.1777443
Ana Perić & Marija Maruna (2022) Post-socialist discourse of urban megaproject development: From City on the Water to Belgrade Waterfront. Cities, 130, 103876, DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2022.103876
Felix Ringel (2022) The Time of Post-Socialism: On the Future of an Anthropological Concept. Critique of Anthropology 42:2, 191–208. DOI:10.1177/ 0308275X221095930
Aleksandar Slaev & Sonia Hirt (2022) Planning, Pluralism, Markets: Experiences from Post-Socialist Varna, Planning Theory & Practice, 23:3, 461-475, DOI: 10.1080/14649357.2022.2061774.

#20 Playing [with] Knowledge: Inclusive Games and Experiments in Science Communication

Session chair(s):

Agnes Matoga (Karlsruher Institute for Technology), Anastasiya Ansteeg

Format type:

Innovative session

Description:

Cities have long been arenas of inequality, where struggles over housing, livelihoods, welfare, and access to public space shape urban life. Today, these struggles are intensified by interconnected crises, such as rising economic inequality, accelerating climate change, and deepening political exclusion. In this context, urban research faces the dual challenge of analysing these dynamics while actively engaging in co-creating inclusive spaces and communication methods with those most affected by precarious housing and living conditions.

This session starts from the premise that science communication itself is a terrain of inequality. Traditional formats, such as lectures, papers, Q&A, often reproduce hierarchies and exclude communities who lack access to academic spaces or influence over research agendas. To contribute meaningfully to urban debates, science communication must move beyond academic circles, reaching those often ignored or silenced: vulnerable groups and marginalized communities.

The session explores how experimental and playful approaches can reimagine science communication as a practice of inclusion. We ask: How can communicative formats become genuinely accessible? How can “playing” with knowledge respect, rather than trivialize, lived experiences? And how might such approaches help urban researchers not just disseminate findings but reshape relationships between academia, policy, and civil society?

Rather than relying on spoken presentations, the session will function as a laboratory of formats and games that bring knowledge production to wider publics. Participants will engage directly with experimental tools, collaborative games, participatory mapping, storytelling exercises, and visual methods that translate complex urban issues into embodied and interactive experiences.

The session is structured around three parts:

1.Short provocations introducing the challenge of inclusive science communication and showcasing examples of experimental methods.
2.Hands-on engagement where participants collectively try playful communication tools designed to lower participation barriers and foster dialogue across social positions.
3.Collective reflection on opportunities and limitations of these approaches, discussing how communicative formats can invite collaboration, co-creation, and critique from those usually excluded.

By linking methodological innovation to urgent urban issues, such as housing and energy transitions, the session contributes to RC21’s concern with how inequalities are produced, expressed, and contested in cities. It emphasizes that science communication is not an afterthought but a vital arena where struggles over inclusion unfold. Through experimentation in practice, the session offers both methodological insights and thematic contributions, inviting participants to rethink how urban research can build communicative spaces that amplify marginalized voices and co-create transformative responses to inequality.
The session chairs will introduce experiences from the PREFIGURE project and other related initiatives that use playful, participatory tools to engage communities around housing justice and energy transitions.

We invite scholars, practitioners, and activists to submit a short abstract that introduces a challenge, experience, or project related to housing inequalities, energy transitions, or other urban inequalities and reflects on experimental methods for science communication, public engagement, or co-creation.

#21 Radical Housing Movements and Collective Futures: From Vulnerability and Precarity to Autonomy

Session chair(s):

Laia Gemma García Fernández (ICLEI), Vafa Dianati

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Housing struggles have long been central to urban studies, yet current inequalities in access to housing mark a distinct reconfiguration of structural forces. Platform capitalism—through short-term letting and investment tourism—turns cities into speculative markets, while green, student, and tech-driven gentrification deepen inequalities. Grassroots housing movements face growing criminalisation, while private property rights are protected and financial systems favour high-income borrowers over those in precarious work. Vulnerability and precarity are central to these structural dynamics and struggles. Following Butler (2004, 2016), vulnerability denotes a universal human condition of dependence on others, institutions, and material supports, while precarity refers to the politically produced inequality of exposure to harm, where some lives are secured and others rendered expendable. Butler’s framework thus offers a critical lens on housing injustices by revealing that deprivation of housing is not merely an economic issue, but a political and ethical question of whose vulnerability is recognised and protected.

Politically engineered precarity has inspired collective responses across cities, including squats, cooperatives, community land trusts, communes, and urban occupations, that reclaim housing as a shared right rather than a commodity. This panel places these counter-institutional practices at the centre of debates on housing inequality by focusing on the transition from vulnerability and precarity to collective care and autonomy, where housing becomes infrastructure for care and mutual aid. These practices are not only responses to crisis or failures of the state but rather world-making political projects that contest the dominant order of property, value, and urban governance. By asserting collective control over land, housing, and care, these movements politicise everyday life and make visible the structural violence of housing markets, racialised displacement, and state neglect. They build infrastructures of the otherwise: new forms of territorial governance, social reproduction, and collective ownership that challenge capitalist urbanism at its root. These are also insurgent practices that reconfigure what counts as infrastructure, who is recognised as a political subject, and what forms of life are deemed liveable.

The panel invites contributions exploring housing as a terrain of struggle, solidarity, and alternative world-making across diverse geographies. We seek papers that situate housing as a political and ethical field where collective actors contest vulnerability and precarity. We welcome interdisciplinary and comparative approaches that foreground the voices, tactics, and imaginaries of communities experimenting with new forms of dwelling, ownership, and care, and encourage dialogue among researchers, activists, and practitioners on how these movements reimagine collective life under precarity and articulate new vocabularies of care, resistance, and belonging.

We welcome a range of contributions, including but not limited to:

• Gendered, racialised, and postcolonial analyses of labour, care, and stewardship within alternative housing movements.
• Ethnographic and participatory approaches highlighting the lived experiences of residents and organisers.
• Comparative and translocal studies tracing the global circulation of ideas, tactics, and governance models.
• Visual, artistic, and spatial methodologies examining the aesthetics, materiality, and spatial practices of collective housing.
• Socio-legal and policy perspectives analysing how alternative housing movements navigate legality, criminalisation, and recognition.

#22 Morphologies of Mobility: Spatial Form, Movement, and Urban Inequality

Session chair(s):

Krity Gera (Royal College of Art), Gerhard Bruyns

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Urban morphology, the physical form, layout, and evolution of cities, plays a decisive role in shaping everyday mobilities, yet this relationship remains under-explored in urban studies. Mobility is not only about the capacity to move but also about how movement constitutes social identities, belonging, and exclusion. The structuring force of space shapes everyday life, modes of displacement and production, and opportunities for social participation (Harvey, 1989; Kaufmann, 2002). Beyond physical characteristics, economic and socio-cultural processes of urban form impact everyday mobility through new forms of knowledge and social connections (Panerai et al., 2004). Understanding how morphology channels, constrains, or enables mobility, and vice versa, is vital for addressing questions of inequality and justice in contemporary urban contexts.

This is especially pressing in the Global South, where rapid, often unregulated urbanisation produces informal settlements, fragmented infrastructures, and uneven development. Here, mobility is deeply conditioned by spatial form, which can exacerbate socio-economic exclusion, limit access to livelihoods and services, and reinforce gendered or class-based constraints. Conversely, these morphologies also reveal practices of resilience and survival, as residents carve out alternative mobilities and reshape space through everyday action. Global migration flows, climate change-induced displacements, and shifting urban economies further demand attention to how morphology and mobility interact. Moving beyond the “triple crisis” (Sheller, 2018) to consider emerging polycrisis, it is crucial to highlight new inequalities and challenges in socio-spatial mobilities. The rapid proliferation of technologies and big data through AI, machine learning, and neural networks requires urgent examination of the intricate relationship between urban morphology and mobilities. While these tools expand analytical capacity, they also introduce epistemological and ethical challenges that may reproduce inequalities.

Building on these discussions, we pose two central questions: What are the consequences of the interrelationship between mobility and urban morphology? How does this relationship produce new forms of inequalities and/or offer insights for more inclusive and connected urban futures? We invite papers that explore not only how built form structures movement but also how mobility practices resist, adapt to, or transform morphologies. By bringing together diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives, this session foregrounds the importance of morphology–mobility linkages as a critical frontier for urban research.

We welcome contributions focused on, but not limited to, the following sub-themes and guiding questions:

1. Centre–Periphery: How do morphological differences between urban cores and peripheries shape mobility, access, and inequality?
2. Global North vs Global South: How do morphology–mobility relations unfold across diverse urban contexts?
3. Migration and Marginalisation: How do migrants and marginalised groups navigate or transform morphological constraints in their everyday mobilities?
4. Lived Identities: How do urban forms influence lived experiences of movement, belonging, and identity across gender, class, and culture?
5. Emerging Practices: How do informal or tactical spatial practices reshape urban form and mobility systems?
6. The Role of Technology: How are AI, big data, and digital tools redefining morphology–mobility analysis, and what ethical challenges follow?
7. Exploratory Methods and Future Research: Which innovative, participatory, or sensory methods best reveal mobility inequality guided by spatial form?

#23 MEGAPROJECT MIRAGES: Understanding the Socio-political Lives of Unbuilt, Incomplete, and Over-Promised Urban Development

Session chair(s):

David Gogishvili (University of Lausanne), David Sichinava, Suzanne Harris-Brandts

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Spectacular megaprojects are key tools for urban governance, supporting nation-building, geopolitical claims, elite boosterism, and property speculation. Amid the intensified global mobility of capital, policies, and urban imaginaries, cities embrace these projects to signify prosperity, with proposals becoming increasingly dramatic and technologically sophisticated (Haines, 2011). Yet, their long timelines mean years pass before tangible outcomes. Meanwhile, these proposals function as powerful ‘megaproject mirages’—projects with potent socio-political lives even when they remain entirely immaterial.

Current scholarship on megaprojects acknowledges their high-risk nature but tends to focus on built examples. This overlooks the strategic advantages of schemes that are never completed. The concept of project ‘failure’ is, therefore, relative (Temenos & Lauermann, 2020); there are many benefits for politicians, developers, and architects in unbuilt works (Harris-Brandts & Gogishvili, 2018). These mirages, which resonate with geographical scholarship on spectrality, shape urban economies and political narratives, having active lives on ‘paper’ (Dogmus & Nielsen, 2020). Their abandonment can thus be seen as an informal policy, the material consequence of state entrepreneurialism that produces ghost housing and urban failures (Liu et al. 2025). Local communities incur significant costs from these schemes as they fuel adjacent speculation, divert public investments, and politically marginalise residents. These real impacts from immaterial schemes highlight the need for new conceptual and methodological tools to analyse their effects, and papers in this session should unpack these key themes.

Arguing that we need to reconsider the notion of failure, this session examines unbuilt, incomplete, and over-promised large-scale urban projects. It explores the utility of megaproject mirages for their proponents while analysing the significant community costs. We invite papers addressing the following (and more) questions: How do these mirages derive their power from specific languages, discourses, and imagery? What is the politico-economic utility of over-promised projects? What are the tangible impacts of seemingly immaterial proposals; on urban land, housing, and communities? What different forms can ‘megaproject mirages’ take?

We seek proposals that study ‘megaproject mirages’ across diverse settings—from speculative landscapes of financial centres to state-led visions of emerging economies—and particularly encourage a comparative dialogue. We welcome contributions from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives that examine the consequences of these unbuilt projects.

References:
Dogmus, Ö. C., & Nielsen, J. Ø. (2020). The on-paper hydropower boom: A case study of corruption in the hydropower sector in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ecological Economics, 172, 106630.

Haines, C. (2011). Cracks in the Façade: Landscapes of Hope and Desire in Dubai. In Roy, A. & Ong, A. (Eds.) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, 160–181. Wiley-Blackwell.

Harris-Brandts, S., & Gogishvili, D. (2018). Architectural rumors: Unrealized megaprojects in Baku, Azerbaijan and their politico-economic uses. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 59(1), 73–97.

Liu A., Jia M. & Chen C. (2025) From speculative dreams to ghost housing realities: homeless homeowners and failed future-making in urban development. Urban Geography, 49 (8), 1821-1841.
Temenos, C., & Lauermann, J. (2020). The urban politics of policy failure. Urban Geography, 41(9), 1109-1118.

#24 Popular Economies of Urban Migration: The (Im)migrant Everyday in Unequal Cities

Session chair(s):

Sophie Gonick (NYU), René Kreichauf

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Migration–both rural to urban and across international frontiers–has remade metropolitan landscapes across the globe. Navigating cities rife with inequalities, low income new arrivals must contend with shifting demands for labor and employment, precarious and predatory housing markets, and, often, mounting debts incurred through the process of migration. In a moment of rising xenophobia and nativism, meanwhile, many migrants also must confront and manage the self against the brutality of both the state and quotidian populist outrage. From top-down state practices of detention and deportation to bottom-up xenophobia, immigration politics shape the urban and confine and produce the lifeworlds of newcomers.

This session will examine the various tactics (im)migrants pursue in cities in the global north and south in order to secure basic needs, manage financial uncertainty, and establish a toehold within urban environments, i.e., the practices that “make life worth living” (Simone 2023). From household structures, to labor beyond binaries of work and home, to resistance to hostile policy and racism, (im)migrants deploy a number of practices in order to manage life in deeply unequal cities. These practices might emerge out of the ambivalences and lacunae of regulation and deregulation; the limits of state capacity; temporalities of migration and emplacement; failures in the housing market; economic necessity; and/or popular traditions of dwelling together. Far from constituting their own illicit sphere of action outside and against official forms of city-making, many of these practices, moreover, are woven into dominant, licit modes of urbanism (Tucker 2023). Drawing on scholars of Southern urbanism, we conceptualize these tactics as contributing to a popular economy of urban migration (Gago 2017, Simone 2019). Extending beyond the formal/informal divide, we use this framing to implicate the expressions of kin relations, social reproduction, economic and political action, and everyday life urban newcomers articulate to secure futures in the midst of urban uncertainty.

We thus invite contributions that explore some aspect of the migrant everyday beyond formalized urban systems, and its relation to collective life at the urban margins. Papers might explore these questions in relation to housing practices, experiences of work outside and beyond the wage, debt as it shapes daily life, and/or transformations of the family and the sphere of social reproduction. Contributions might also examine the structural aspects of regulation and governance that shape everyday practice. We welcome papers that examine and trouble the boundaries between formal/informal, licit/illicit, and legal/extralegal/illegal, and global north/south. Papers can be both empirical and theoretical, and draw on cases from cities across the globe.

Works Cited

Gago, V. (2017). Neoliberalism from below: Popular pragmatics and baroque economies. Duke University Press.

Simone, A. (2023). Urban Popular Economies and Territories of Operation. The Oxford Handbook of Superdiversity, 449.

Simone, A. (2019). Contests over value: From the informal to the popular. Urban Studies, 56(3), 616-619.

Tucker, J. L. (2023). Outlaw Capital: Everyday Illegalities and the Making of Uneven Development (Vol. 59). University of Georgia Press.

#25 Inequalities in urban future-making: foundations, framings, and contestations

Session chair(s):

Monika Grubbauer (HafenCity University Hamburg), Katharina Manderscheid

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

While questions of urban inequality have long constituted a topic of inquiry for the social sciences, the picture is more ambiguous when it comes to the applied spatial sciences and policy-making concerned with urban development. Questions of access to housing, social services, and infrastructure are certainly of key concern in disciplines such as architecture and planning, both in research as well as in practice. The same is true for new forms of environmental inequalities: As the effects of climate change, such as droughts, heat waves, and flooding, are increasingly felt in cities around the world, it has become also clear that the effects on cities are unequally distributed, particularly affecting urban populations that are the most vulnerable and least affluent. Many cities take measures to tackle these interrelated ecological and social challenges when adapting urban spaces to new realities, reducing the impact of environmental hazards and extreme weather events, and implementing future-oriented strategies. Yet, whether and how forms of inequality are considered, reflected on, and actively approached in such measures and strategies of urban future-making remains open to discussion.

This session examines the capacity of social actors and institutions in urban development in addressing current dynamics of urban inequality. How do the policy instruments, planning strategies, and urban design solutions, which are largely centred on questions of climate change and mitigation and the decarbonization of the building sector, consider implicit or explicit challenges of inequality? The focus is on professionals in built environment disciplines as social actors in various roles in the state administration, private sector, non-profit sector, and civil society initiatives, as well as on institutions in related fields of action in urban development policy and planning. How do these actors and institutions advance their conceptual and methodological foundations for dealing with forms of urban inequality in the light of new complexities, what types of data are considered, what are the tools and methods used for operationalization and decision-making, and how is each of these aspects legitimized and discursively framed, made accessible to public debate, and potentially contested?

We invite papers which address the above questions from a variety of angles, both theoretically and empirically, and across diverse contexts. Of interest are, particularly, various fields of urban development action which are currently driven by the urgency to transform cities and their built environment in the light of ecological challenges ahead, including housing, transport, energy, and water. Possible subthemes include urban climate and biodiversity strategies, urban megaprojects and urban infrastructure, green building policies, and disaster prevention and mitigation. We welcome papers which provide empirical insights and a critical discussion of how inequality is addressed in these fields of action, but papers which reflect on the epistemological foundations and theoretical implications are equally welcome.

#26 Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary urban research on inequality: theoretical and methodological challenges in the context of socio-ecological transformation

Session chair(s):

Alexander Hamedinger (TU Wien), Raphaela Kogler, Michael Friesenecker, Ariane Sept

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

One of today’s most urgent societal challenges is undoubtedly the anthropogenic climate change which is essentially multi-dimensional and multi-scalar regarding its causes and impacts. More fundamentally, climate change affects urban societies unequally because often socially disadvantaged groups are comparatively stronger impacted due to their place of residence and lack of social and economic capital necessary for adapting to climate change (as exemplified by research on urban heat islands). To cope with climate change and to deal with its complexities and intricacies on the urban scale, urban scholars increasingly call for reforms towards socio-ecological transformation of the built environment, but also more radically of the organisation of urban societies and urban economies in general. Socio-ecological transformation brings together demands for sustainability and social justice, democratization, and reduction of resource consumption and decarbonization.

Consequently, researching climate change, understanding and normatively demanding socio-ecological transformation at an urban scale requires multi-dimensional, multi-scale and multi-methods research approaches – in other words, they require interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. If socio-ecological transformation is to be taken seriously, then hierarchical relations within research teams comprising different disciplines, and between researchers working at research institutions, NGOs, and residents or civil society, must be abandoned in favour of more cooperative and co-creative forms of knowledge production.

Interdisciplinarity (here understood as the problem-focused integration of different disciplines, their methods and theories) and transdisciplinarity (here understood as participatory knowledge production incorporating various forms of knowledge, particularly that of residents and civil society) have been promoted, particularly since the emergence of the notion of sustainability. However, in practice researchers still face challenges such as integrating theories from different disciplines in urban research, conducting participatory research with and for people without reproducing inequalities, engaging with policy makers in a constructive and trustful manner, and simply conducting urban research within the narrow corsets of funded research projects (e.g., time, team, resources). In addition, especially in transdisciplinary projects, often there are differing expectations and needs of the scientific field on the one hand and the practical fields on the other.

This session addresses urban researchers from different disciplines and welcomes papers which will reflect and discuss the following essential questions, drawing on their projects, challenges and best practices:

- How are interdisciplinarity and/or transdisciplinarity conceptualized in the design and implementation of urban research on inequality?
- How can we take inter- and transdisciplinarity seriously in research without reducing them to mere lip service or (re)producing inequalities?
- Which are the main obstacles of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary urban research experienced in concrete projects about inequality and socio-ecological transformation?
- How are interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity combined in research projects, both process and content-wise?

#27 Municipal Practices and Urban Inequalities in SWANA Cities

Session chair(s):

Mona Harb (American University of Beirut), Azadeh Mashayekhi, Azam Khatam

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Standard models of decentralization assume uniform local preferences, strong institutions, fiscal autonomy, transparent information flows, and enforceable accountability. These conditions are frequently absent in SWANA and beyond. In such settings, decentralization can intensify exclusion and enable elite capture, producing sharp urban inequalities. Yet, the literature overlooks how decentralization, representation, and participation operate under authoritarian or undemocratic rule. Varied political histories, factional and sectarian conflicts, and hardened legacies of centralization warrant closer scrutiny towards decentralization trajectories.

How are SWANA municipalities (not) governing the intersecting urban challenges and risks facing their residents, and how do their actions mitigate or entrench inequality? The municipal landscape is uneven: in some countries, elections are absent (e.g., Egypt, Syria); in others, political and legal frameworks tightly constrain local authority, recentralize power within ruling elites, and limit room for autonomous governance (e.g., Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Turkey, Iran). Unlike elsewhere, SWANA municipalities often lack institutional and fiscal space, as well as political capital, to maneuver. Where municipal bureaucracies exist, capacity to champion planning and development is frequently thin, and constrained by recurrent cycles of crisis and conflict. Patterns of selective provision are common. Some municipalities still marshal resources for middle- and high-income districts that function as growth machines for local capital, while alliances with real-estate bourgeoisie often anchor these arrangements. By contrast, in low-income areas, municipal authority is largely absent beyond routine policing, and service provision is captured by local actors whose extractive practices are often tolerated, if not enabled.

We invite single-case and comparative papers that examine how municipalities in the SWANA region represent local dwellers, manage territorial affairs across social groups and neighborhoods, and interact with national authorities. We are particularly interested in analyses of urban policies, infrastructural projects, and development interventions that shape patterns of inequality. Contributions can examine these dynamics from the three angles below:

(i) National–local interactions in urban welfare regimes: Centralized political power has typically been coupled with state-led scale-making that positions municipalities at the bottom of bureaucratic hierarchies. How do political, legal, fiscal, and institutional arrangements (re) structure power and authority across national, regional, and urban scales, and across histories?

(ii) Reforms in local governance and power and representation of local dwellers: How have central–local struggles and legal change reshaped municipal capacity? Where decentralization has been adopted, what are the consequences for urban service provision? How do bureaucrats, planners, and activists navigate fiscal and institutional constraints to plan and deliver services? How does decentralization, and the exercise of voice under limited political pluralism, reconfigure local power dynamics, and with what risks of elite capture, inequality, and conflict along social cleavages?

(iii) Selective service provision, inequality, and informality: Where decentralization has produced public–private partnerships and/or municipal devolution, how do selective patterns of service reinforce socio-spatial inequalities and hinge on political or financial support? How do informal groups and local actors step in to govern? How are their practices negotiated with municipal authorities, and with what consequences for residents?

We look forward to discussing together SWANA cities' unequal decentralization and local governance.

#28 Governing Food Systems: Understanding Food Inequalities and Food Insecurities in the City

Session chair(s):

Petra Lütke (University of Münster), Filippo Oncini, Birgit Hoinle, Alejandro Ciordia Mario Trifuoggi

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

As urbanization advances, cities face numerous challenges in ensuring the well-being of their inhabitants, of which access to fresh and healthy food is a crucial aspect. This is often distributed unevenly and influenced by factors such as income, education, ethnicity and place of residence, among others. This can lead to social injustices related to food in urban contexts. Thus, urban food insecurity is increasingly becoming a central challenge of contemporary cities, not only in the Global South, but across the Global North, as inequalities intensify under the pressures of economic precarity, inflation, climate shocks, and welfare retrenchment. Against this backdrop, food charities (food banks, mutual aid networks, faith-based distribution, social supermarkets, etc.) have proliferated, as well as alternative food networks and civic governance initiatives, such as Food Policy Councils. However, their roles and outcomes are far from neutral: they exist in dynamic tensions with municipal and national welfare policies, social movements, private food actors, poverty relief measures, and beneficiaries of food support. These initiatives highlight the need for methodological approaches to understand the complexities of urban food systems and its inherent power relations.

This session wants to explore the governance of food inequality and food insecurity in cities through the lens of agency, institutional relations, and spatial dynamics. The session aims to enhance the understanding of food governance from different intersectional and systems perspectives. We invite papers that address some of the following questions:

• What are causes, consequences and coping mechanisms for food inequalities and poverty in urban areas?
• What is the role of power and privilege in shaping food systems and exacerbating food inequalities?
• How do food charities interact with municipal and regional authorities? Under what governance regimes do they become extensions of state social policy, corrective band-aid measures, or sites of resistance and activism?
• How do power relations, politics of scale, and multi-level governance shape charitable food infrastructures and service provisioning?
• In what ways do different models (e.g. emergency relief, food justice, dignity-based access, rights-based frames, cooperative models) produce different outcomes in terms of equality, social inclusion, or political mobilization?
• What are strategies and challenges of alternative food networks and Food Policy Councils to promote food justice and sovereignty?

We see this session as a regular panel of four papers, each with approximately 15 minutes of presentation followed by discussion. The session seeks to foster dialogue across methodological divides (qualitative, quantitative, archival) and across global contexts within and between countries. By bringing together scholars working on food governance, food geography, social policy and infrastructures, we aim to spark new comparative thinking about how cities address or reproduce food inequalities and food insecurities, in times of multiple crisis and beyond.

#29 Researching China in Challenging Contexts: Methodological Innovation and Reflexive Fieldwork

Session chair(s):

Xiaojian Zheng (University of Galway)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

China's evolving political and social context presents significant challenges for researchers studying local affairs, urban governance, and regional inequalities. Conventional research methods, such as interviews, surveys, and participant observation, face increasing constraints due to restricted access, institutional gatekeeping, surveillance, and sensitivities surrounding political and social issues. These conditions raise essential questions about how knowledge is produced, whose perspectives are represented, and what methodological and ethical strategies are needed to study inequality and social dynamics in contemporary China.

This panel brings together scholars exploring empirical studies or case studies that demonstrate innovative methodological approaches to these challenges. We invite contributions that reflect on reflexive, ethical, and creative strategies for fieldwork under conditions of limited access, political sensitivity, or social vulnerability. Approaches may include digital ethnography, remote collaborations, mixed-methods, comparative regional studies, or alternative data sources.

Rather than offering prescriptive "how-to" solutions, the panel foregrounds the complexities of research: negotiating access, engaging reflexively with ethical dilemmas, and managing the emotional and practical challenges of conducting fieldwork in sensitive contexts. By interrogating the methodological conditions of knowledge production, the panel also contributes to theoretical debates on how inequalities are constituted, represented, and contested through research practices.

Discussions arising from these contributions may include, but are not limited to:

• Methodological strategies for researching local governance, urban inequalities, and regional dynamics under restricted access.
• Reflexive engagement with ethical, political, and social dilemmas in fieldwork.
• The role of innovative methodologies in capturing experiences of marginalisation, exclusion, or social tension.
• Comparative insights and implications for understanding urban and regional inequalities in other national or global contexts.

By emphasising methodological innovation, reflexivity, and ethical awareness, this panel contributes to the broader mission of understanding how inequalities are produced, contested, and addressed in urban and regional settings. While grounded in the Chinese context, the panel invites comparative reflections from scholars working in different regions who face similar challenges of limited access or political sensitivity. It highlights the potential of methodological creativity to generate rigorous, contextually grounded knowledge that speaks to both local and global dynamics of inequality.

#30 On brokers and clienteles: new perspectives on urban politics, democracy and inequalities

Session chair(s):

Telma Hoyler (Centre for Metropolitan Studies), Côme Salvaire

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Urban political life has long been shaped by overlapping mechanisms of representation and resource distribution. Among them, clientelism and brokerage have historically structured access to goods, services, and opportunities. Yet these practices neither fully explain nor exhaust the complexity of urban politics. Their persistence, transformation, and interaction with other forms of political organization invite us to examine how intermediaries coexist with, adapt to, or are displaced by institutional innovation, bureaucratic reform, and collective action. This raises crucial questions about the role of political intermediaries in representation, democratic life, and the stabilization of urban political systems.

Classic studies of clientelism emerged in contexts marked by rapid urbanization, industrialization, and rural migration—periods when states centralized control over employment, housing, social benefits, and basic services. These settings shaped how scholars conceptualized clientelism: as a mechanism through which access to resources and integration into urban life were mediated, often reinforcing inequalities. While twenty-first-century brokerage shares many of these features, its roles have expanded and shifted. In some contexts, intermediaries now manage informal economies, regulate violence, for instance. At the same time, continuities with earlier forms may remain striking. Contrary to “evolutionist” perspectives that viewed clientelism as a transitory stage of political development, it has persisted—despite democratization, the expansion of mass media, and new religious and civic critiques of intermediation.

We invite contributions that critically examine the categories and dynamics of clientelism, brokerage and participation in urban contexts, with attention to both continuity and change. We particularly encourage papers that address two broad themes:

1. Structuring, Destructuring, and Institutionalization of Clientelism
Clientelism is more than an exchange of resources for votes. It can stabilise political orders, entrench inequalities, and embed networks of loyalty. At the same time, it can undermine institutions, generate conflicts, or destabilize urban societies when it transforms. We welcome papers that explore:
• How clientelism becomes institutionalized across different contexts;
• How it adapts to economic, social, and technological transformations;
• How these processes reshape inequalities and urban political orders.

2. Brokerage, Participation, Representation, and Democratic Life
Political intermediaries—brokers, fixers, social movement coordinators and local leaders—mediate between citizens and institutions. They facilitate resource access, channel demands, and influence both collective action and governance reforms. Yet they also raise crucial questions about representation and inclusion. This panel aim to interrogate their paradoxical role: as mechanisms that reproduce inequality while also creating pathways for representation, redistribution, and democratic practice in the city. We invite papers that investigate:
• How brokers reproduce or mitigate inequalities in housing, welfare, services, and infrastructure;
• How brokerage evolves amid welfare retrenchment, precarity, and shifting state–society relations;
• Comparative perspectives on brokerage in the Global South and North, highlighting convergences and divergences;
• Brokerage as a contested field where actors and institutions negotiate legitimate forms of mediation and representation.

#31 The Indebted City: Tracing the Unequal Burdens of Housing Financialization

Session chair(s):

Adriana Hurtado- Tarazona (Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia)), Hanna Hilbrandt, Erandi Barroso-Olmedo, Jess Linz

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Amid tumbling wages and rising asset values (Adkins et al., 2020), living with debt has become a defining feature of urban life in the North and South (García-Lamarca & Kaika, 2016). This panel explores debt as an urban condition — one that stretches from the body to the community and urban life.

Recent feminist approaches frame debt as a relationship of domination that organizes daily life, shapes subjectivities, and is inherently gendered (Cavallero & Gago, 2019). Moreover, geographies have pointed to the spatiality of debt (Harker, 2017, 2019). These literatures contend that debt is not merely a financial obligation but also a social relationship that transforms how people inhabit cities, maintain households, and build communities (Lazzarato, 2015; Federici, 2014; Kılınçarslan, 2024). Living in the indebted city disproportionately affects vulnerable individuals and communities across lines of gender, class, race, and migration status. It requires us to understand the ways these individuals and groups endure and respond to the burden of housing financialization in daily life.

Understanding the spatial and material expressions of debt becomes crucial as housing speculation, evictions, and property neglect reshape urban peripheries and challenge traditional modalities of making home (Aalbers, 2017; Rolnik, 2017). Housing financialization transforms class relations and creates new forms of dependency through formal mechanisms like subprime lending and informal credit networks (Soederberg, 2015; Reis & Antunes De Oliveira, 2023). At the same time, households develop diverse mundane and political responses to cope with debt crises. These relations and practices are conditioned by housing infrastructure and urban geography, as making home in conditions of over-indebtedness shapes relations of belonging and community formation.

We seek to generate dialogue across different urban contexts and housing finance regimes, examining how debt operates as both a mechanism of urban inequality and a site of political contestation. By bringing together diverse empirical cases, methodological and theoretical approaches, the session aims to advance critical understanding of the financialized city while highlighting the agency and resistance strategies of indebted communities.

This panel session welcomes papers addressing the following key themes:

• Care: How debt relationships transform care practices within households and communities, including the gendered division of debt management labor and care work as collateral in informal lending networks.
• Subjectivity: How indebtedness affects the relationship to the self, including but not limited to embodiment, mental and emotional changes, self-perception, agency, spirituality, attachments and perceived position in relation to others.
• Solidarity: What forms of collective action emerge from shared experiences of indebtedness, including tenant organizing, mutual aid networks, and women's collectives challenging financial violence.
• Violence: How indebtedness enables new forms of gender-based and economic violence, including domestic violence linked to housing debt stress and eviction as systematic displacement.
• Digital Applications and Differentiated Debt Sources: How new technologies and diverse credit sources reshape urban debt relations, including fintech applications targeting women and informal workers.

#32 Emotional Heritage, Urban Spaces, and the Politics of Memory

Session chair(s):

Macarena Ibarra (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile/NupatS), Carolina Stefoni

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Over the past three decades, cultural heritage has shifted from being understood as a fixed, material legacy defined by Western cultural codes to a dynamic, socially constructed process. Scholarship now highlights its relational character—rooted in memory, identity, and power—rather than treating heritage as a universal set of inherent values (Smith, 2006; Ashworth, Graham & Tunbridge, 2007; Harrison, 2013; Harvey, 2001; Waterton & Watson, 2015). Understanding both tangible and intangible heritage therefore requires acknowledging its multiple uses and contested meanings, often in tension with the “authorized heritage discourse” (Smith, 2006).

This panel invites contributions that approach heritage as an emotional matter (Waterton & Watson, 2013; Tolia-Kelly et al., 2017). As heritage is not only a set of representations but also lived experiences and affective encounters between people and places, it might generate pride and belonging, but also grief, nostalgia, anger, and claims of injustice. These emotions shape how communities engage with heritage sites, influencing practices of memory, interpretation, and use.

Focusing on urban contexts, the panel seeks to explore how emotions surrounding heritage mediate tensions, silences, and absences, while also creating possibilities for recognition, dialogue, and contestation among different actors and communities. Possible sub-themes include:

• Contested heritage and the politics of memory in cities
• Affective encounters with place and belonging
• Heritage as a site of social conflict, exclusion, or recognition
• Silences, absences, and forgetting in urban heritage
• Everyday, grassroots, and community-led practices of heritage
• Intersections of tangible and intangible heritage in contexts of change, gentrification, conservation or demolition.

We welcome contributions that engage with questions such as: How do emotions such as pride, grief, anger, or nostalgia shape engagements with urban heritage? In what ways do heritage practices mediate inclusion and exclusion in cities? How are silences and erasures emotionally experienced and contested? Can heritage create spaces for dialogue and reconciliation across divided or unequal communities?

Submissions may draw on a wide range of methodological approaches, including oral history, ethnography, discourse analysis, visual methods, participatory and action research, or comparative case studies. The panel particularly encourages work that mobilizes theoretical perspectives from critical heritage studies (Smith, 2006; Harrison, 2013), memory studies (Halbwachs; Nora; Assmann), affect theory (Waterton & Watson, 2013; Tolia-Kelly et al., 2017), and spatial theory (Lefebvre; Massey).

By bringing together perspectives from sociology, anthropology, history, and related disciplines, this panel aims to foreground the affective dimensions of heritage in urban settings and to interrogate how memory, identity, and politics are negotiated through emotional engagements with the past in the city.

#33 Care and Contention: Local Activism and Urban Inequalities

Session chair(s):

Anna Zhelnina (a.zhelnina@uu.nl)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Situated at the intersection of personal life and public concern, local initiatives often emerge in response to deteriorating infrastructure, environmental stress, housing insecurity, and the erosion of everyday support systems. These place-based struggles bring global crises, such as climate change, migration, and socio-economic precarity, into focus. From the emerging research we know that participation in local activism can foster mental well-being, emotional resilience, and civic belonging (Gilster 2012; Wardle et al. 2024). Yet these benefits are unequally distributed and often fragile, especially in neighborhoods marked by structural disadvantage. This panel is interested in explorations of in how neighborhood groups manage these tensions and build forms of infrastructural and emotional care that support sustained action over time.

In recent years, we have witnessed growing interest in “care” within urban contexts, driven by housing crises, public health challenges like COVID-19, and persistent social inequalities. Emotional and infrastructural care, mutual aid, and feminist ethics of care are promising directions for urban research (Tronto 1998; Segal 2023; Carr 2005; Williams 2020). However, the field of urban social movement studies has historically developed to address the agentic dimension of confronting urban inequalities as collectives (Florea et al. 2022).

This session suggests bringing together research on urban social movements and other forms of activism with the increasingly important care paradigm, to lay the groundwork for potentially inspiring new perspectives. To do so, it invites contributions viewing urban neighborhoods and other localities as strategic arenas (Jasper and Duyvendak 2015) of sociality and agency, where care for the communities, self, and urban infrastructure energizes transformative action to combat social inequalities.

The session invites conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions that may address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How do neighborhood initiatives engage with infrastructural inequality, housing struggles, and environmental degradation?
• In what ways do neighborhood-based actors perform “care work” to sustain their engagement and support others?
• How do local policies and institutional frameworks shape the possibilities and limits of neighborhood action?
• What are the risks of burnout, depoliticization, or co-optation in place-based activism?
• How do neighborhood struggles scale up (or fail to scale up) into broader political movements?

The panel welcomes contributions based on research in all regions of the world, specifically encouraging scholars from the Global South and Eastern Europe to share their expertise.

#34 ‘Urban Being’ in Suspended Animation: Emerging Theoretical Frameworks and Methodological Approaches in the Global South

Session chair(s):

Rishi Jha (FLAME University), Anup Tripathi, Richa Bhardwaj, Richard Ek

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

The rapid and often unplanned urbanization of the Global South has given rise to distinct forms of urban precarity that challenge established Northern theoretical models. Precarity here extends beyond labour insecurity to encompass a pervasive condition of vulnerability affecting housing, tenure, infrastructure, citizenship, and materiality of urban life. In an ontological sense, it relegates ‘Urban Being’ to a constant state of flux. This state of flux or suspended animation denotes bureaucratic delays, dispossession, precarity, uncertainty, waiting, violence, systemic abandonment and much more. Thus, speaking from elsewhere(s) than normative Euro-American understanding, this session seeks to critically interrogate and advance the theoretical and methodological tools necessary to analyze the specific manifestations of urban precarity in the cities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

This session will explore theoretical frameworks that center Southern urban experiences, but also extend and speak vis-a-vis their northern counterparts. We build on meso-concepts like “precarity” (Butler, 2004) and “precarious life” that provide a quasi-philosophical starting point, but often lack political-geographical specificity or generality. Precarity has become new site of negotiation(s) (Bertlesen, 2021). State, politics, market forces and emerging urbanism(s) create pluralities of animations that require theorizing. At the same time, population groups tend to engage with adversities and make urban life possible amidst suspension. Thus, building upon concepts like “quiet” to “loud” encroachment” of people (Bayat, 2004; Gillespie, 2016), we seek to capture and theorise mundane as well as collective, incremental and exceptional urban interfaces negotiating for space which affects their material and socio-political living. We encourage contributions that extend analysis of informality as norm(s), rather than mere exceptions within planetary urbanism (Roy, 2005; Murray, 2017). In what ways, thus, people emerge as infrastructure of being and turn academic gaze towards socio-political collaborations underpinning survival in the absence of formal and functional urban systems (Simone, 2004).

Methodologically, studying such fluid, informal, time- and often politically sensitive contexts demands innovative and sustained approaches that promise to capture the nuanced realities of precarious urbanites. Particularly interesting would be ways researchers can ethically and effectively document emergent lives within uncertainty. We would explore mixed and evolving ways of ethnographic, participatory, action research, using digital and visual methods. A key focus will be on theoretical-methodological reflexivity: how to navigate issues of power, representation, and positionality when researching marginalized communities, and how to develop research practices that are not only about the marginalised population but are
accountable to them. By bringing together scholars working across different Southern urban contexts, this session aims to foster a dialogue that provincializes Northern Urbanism and contributes to the development of a more robust, grounded, and ethically-attuned urban theory and practice for the 21st century.

Key Words: Urban Being, Exception(s), Precarity, Institutional Practice(s), Global South

#35 Experiencing Violences, Shaping (In)securities: Perspectives from Cities of the Global South

Session chair(s):

Gareth A. Jones (London School of Economics (LSE)), Morgan Olive Carmellini, Line Relisieux

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This session addresses the entanglements between urban violence, security, and inequalities in cities of the Global South. Violence, in its multiple forms, remains an important feature of urban life, shaping how people navigate and imagine the city. Its consequences permeate all segments of society, albeit unevenly, as marginalised communities disproportionately bear the burdens of violence. Shaped by enduring urban inequalities, everyday encounters with violence elicit diverse responses and strategies that produce distinct senses and practices of security. These practices can either reinforce existing hierarchies and cycles of violence or open up spaces for resistance and transformation. Understanding security as a terrain of everyday negotiation, struggle, and privilege, the session explores how experiences of violence and practices of security-making interact to reproduce, contest, and reconfigure urban inequalities in the Global South.

The session brings together scholars addressing three interrelated questions. First, how is urban violence experienced by different social groups, and how do racialised, gendered, and classed dynamics shape these experiences? Second, how do state and non-state actors respond to violence, and how are their practices of security-making entangled with existing inequalities? Third, what kind of spatial consequences are produced at these intersections, and how do they reconfigure the organisation of cities?

The session will address several key themes in relation to violence, (in)security, and inequality. Considering that urban violence can be lived as a continuum, it explores the actors and factors that interrupt or reproduce violence, highlighting the everyday negotiations that sustain or transform cycles of (in)security. Second, it investigates experiences and practices of (in)security among diverse social groups, focusing on emotions, affect, and belonging as central to understanding how violence is lived and made sense of. Third, it examines the spatial consequences of (in)security-making, including urban fragmentation, segregation, how protection reshapes the built environment, and changing boundaries of mobility and memory.

Together, these contributions move beyond binary understandings of violence versus security to reveal their socio-spatial embeddedness and ambivalence. They highlight how (in)security is produced through everyday practices that are simultaneously constraining and enabling the reproduction of urban violence. The panel contributes to broader debates on urban inequalities, governance, and everyday life by inviting reflections on the ambivalence of (in)security-making, and on how different actors – from states and armed groups to community organisers and families – forge alternative ways of living with, through, and against violence in cities of the Global South.

The panel welcomes papers adopting ethnographic, participatory, and qualitative approaches that examine:

• the violence–security continuum;
• affect, belonging, and everyday insecurity;
• entanglements of security and inequality;
• spatial reorganisation and fragmentation; and
• rethinking security from the everyday.

#36 Reparative Urban Futures: new urban imperatives

Session chair(s):

Catalina Ortiz (UCL), Natalia Villamizar Duarte

Format type:

Innovative Session

Description:

City-making is a by-product of racial capitalism and a global colonial history of protracted violence. As a result, the multiple harms, territorial wounds and collective trauma have produced and continued reproduced urban inequalities that demand new frameworks for conceptualising reparation and territorial healing (Ortiz and Gómez Córdoba, 2023) in cities. This roundtable seeks to frame the political project of reparative justice in urban spaces by opening up the debate about practices to heal wounds from epistemic, racial, slow and colonial violence emerging in cities.

The roundtable looks for contributions addressing the profound challenges of climate catastrophe, colonial violence, armed conflict, and authoritarianism that continue to shape urban landscapes. Our aim is to collectively explore how a reparative planning praxis—one that acknowledges territories as living entities—can contribute to healing our damaged relationships with each other and with the Earth. By reframing urban studies as a territorial and ethical praxis, this panel positions urban scholarship as central to repairing the planetary civilizational crisis we inhabit.

We would like to expand this debate by engaging in questions such as:
How do processes and practices of reparative justice activate the spatial imagination of communities affected by violence-related trauma?
How can territorial healing and reparative planning perspectives transform cross-disciplinary urban research and practice?
How can we connect place-based memories of violence, healing and reparation with urban policy, planning and design?
What do creative and collaborative methods offer critical urban and civic pedagogies to foster territorial reparation and healing?

This roundtable is proposed together with the panel “Reparative Urban Futures: healing inequality and violence through territorial praxis and pedagogy”. By proposing two connected sessions in a different format, we aim to encourage a wider range of participation from the audience and to facilitate direct interaction between participants. Together, this panel and roundtable are intended to explore collective thinking about the possibilities of a reparative planning approach which allow us to reframe urban studies as a territorial praxis that holds the potential of healing inequalities and violence through territorial praxis and pedagogy.

#37 Gentrification, residential change and displacement in times of big data

Session chair(s):

Christoph Zangger (Bern University of Applied Sciences)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Much of the existing research on gentrification and its consequences in terms of (re-)producing social inequalities follows the quantitative-qualitative divide in the social sciences (Brown-Saracino, 2017). Focusing on few, singled-out neighborhoods undergoing gentrification processes, qualitative studies have provided rich insights into the lived experiences of gentrification and displacement, encompassing ethnic, social, cultural and political changes beyond the mere economic and physical upgrading of neighborhoods (Brown-Saracino and Rumpf, 2011; Hyra et al., 2019). Quantitative studies, on the other hand, have used census data to identify and measure the extent of gentrification and displacement across multiple neighborhoods and cities (Easton et al., 2020; Finio, 2022).

Yet, both approaches have their limitations. While qualitative studies tend to focus on selected neighborhoods that often receive public and academic attention, neglecting other, less prominent areas (Barton, 2016), quantitative studies are limited by the availability and granularity of (census) data, failing therewith to assess the multiplexity of gentrification and displacement processes beyond
socio-economic indicators and physical upgrading (Slater, 2011). Meanwhile, new data sources (e.g., social media, web-scraped data) and computational methods (e.g., (unsupervised) machine learning, natural language processing) have emerged that allow studying often overlooked aspects of gentrification and displacement in quantitative research, such as changes in the cultural and social fabric of neighborhoods, and to incorporate information formerly limited to qualitative approaches (e.g., computer vision or using transformer-based methods to analyze visual and textual data; Liu et al., 2019; Naik et al., 2017).

This session invites contributions that explore how new data sources and computational methods can be used to study gentrification, residential change and displacement. We welcome both methodological contributions that discuss the potential and challenges of using new data sources and methods, as well as empirical investigations of how gentrification (re-)produces inequalities in specific contexts.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• New data sources (e.g., social media, web-scraped data) to study gentrification and displacement
• Assessing the multiplexity of gentrification and displacement processes beyond socio-economic and physical upgrading (e.g., cultural or political changes)
• Comparing traditional (e.g., census data) with new data sources
• Identifying gentrification and displacement patterns and trends using computational methods (e.g., (un)supervised machine learning, natural language processing)
• Blending insights from new data sources and methods with qualitative insights on gentrification and displacement
• Risks and biases of new data sources and computational methods (e.g., exclusion of marginalized groups, algorithmic bias, ethical implications for inequality research)

Conceptually, this session aims to bring both quantitative, computational as well as qualitative approaches closer together. We look forward to any contributions that study the drivers as well as the consequences of gentrification in terms of residential change, displacement, and the resulting inequalities using suitable, novel approaches.

#38 Stateness in urban politics: Thinking with, across and beyond Eastern Europe and Africa

Session chair(s):

Varvara Karipidou (UCL), Jennifer Robinson, Wilfred Jana

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This session seeks to foster cross-regional conversations between two regions often treated as peripheral in global urban studies, by bringing together cases from Africa and Eastern Europe to critically engage with analyses of the nature of the state, state actors and state agency in urban development.

The state is an increasingly important actor in many urbanising contexts, notably in relation to large-scale and infrastructure-led development, as well as more authoritarian and centralised modes of urban development. State institutions and actors profoundly shape contemporary urbanisation processes and outcomes. More generally, though, the role of central government in urban development has been neglected (Brenner, 2019; Shatkin, 2022). The conceptualisation of “stateness” therefore demands attention. However, much of the existing theorisation of the role of the state in urban politics, rooted in Western contexts, fails to capture the fluid and negotiated nature of statehood in regions where institutional structures and governance mechanisms intersect with diverse actor interests including personal wealth accumulation, enhancing personal and private networks and projecting legitimacy (Kinossian, 2012; Hagmann and Péclard, 2010).

African studies has a rich literature on the nature of state power and state actors’ interests (Fourchard, 2024; Cirolia & Harber, 2022); and Eastern European scholars have engaged with interpreting the transitional forms of statehood after the demise of socialism (O’Dwyer, 2006; Ion, 2014). Scholars across these regions have therefore long grappled with the complexities of state actors, positioning them to make vital contributions to emerging debates on the role of the state in urban transformation. By placing African and Eastern European urban experiences in dialogue the session aims to rethink how we theorise statehood, governance, and urban politics across diverse settings.

The panel will foster comparative conversations that pose questions from each region to inform interpretations of the other. It will encourage thinking with, from, and across Africa and Eastern Europe to advance respectful, grounded, and transformative comparative urban studies. Despite growing calls to decentre knowledge production in urban studies and move beyond dominant Western frameworks, theoretical contributions from underrepresented regions remain marginal in mainstream debates (Müller et al., 2025). Yet both African and Eastern European contexts offer rich sites of theoretical innovation, capable of deconstructing entrenched assumptions and reshaping how we think about the state, urban governance, and the politics of development.

We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

- State agency and urban governance: How do state actors navigate, negotiate, and legitimise power in rapidly changing political and economic contexts?
- Emergent stateness: How is ‘stateness’ or public authority performed or negotiated across a range of actors, institutions and practices?
- Central government actors in urban development? To what extent and on what basis do central government actors and institutions shape urban developments?
- Transnational power relations: How are state actors’ priorities and interests shaped by external influences, or “extraversion”?
- Bypassing, corruption and shadow institutions: How do individual actors and political organisations create alternative or hidden procedures to shape outcomes in their interests, or to ensure effective results?

#39 Active Urbanisms: Sport, Movement, and the Contested City

Session chair(s):

Lakshya Yog (National Law School of India University), Devra Waldman

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This session seeks papers that interrogate ‘active urbanisms’ as sites of accumulation, contestation, and social reproduction. In doing so, this session aims to expand critical scholarship on the intersections of physical activity, sport infrastructure, and urban transformation. While existing research in urban studies tends to excessively focus on sporting mega-events and sport-oriented development (Koch, 2018), we aim to broaden the lens to examine the ways in which diverse forms of bodily movement, including elite athletics and everyday walking, from children's play to adapted recreation, are co-produced by contemporary urban processes.

Previously, scholars have shown how mega-events are used as tools to produce a vision of world-class cities while facilitating the displacement of the urban poor, the privatisation of public space and producing new geographies of spectatorship and consumption (Andrews & Silk, 2018; Baviskar, 2014; Hiller, 2000). Yet the mundane everyday movement and associated infrastructures, such as parks, streets, playgrounds, and cycling lanes, equally demand critical scrutiny. These spaces not only embody contested visions of health citizenship but also reveal patterns of racialised and gendered access and increasingly operate as sites of data extraction through fitness platforms and insurance technologies (Lupton, 2013).

In addition, rising temperatures and worsening air quality continue to reshape the possibilities for outdoor activity, particularly in marginalised neighbourhoods lacking shade, cooling infrastructure, or adequate facilities (Harlan et al., 2006). Here, perspectives emerging from disability justice paradigm further outline the exclusion of non-normative bodies due to urban design aimed exclusively at promoting "active living" (Imrie, 2012).

At the same time, the emergence of commodified fitness landscapes, such as wellness districts (Kraus et al., 2019), represents new forms of urban entrepreneurialism, where health promotion intersects with real estate speculation and class/race/gender/ability-based spatial configurations. Meanwhile, DIY practices and tactical approaches focused on informal play spaces, guerrilla sports interventions, and community-led activations suggest counter-practices that resist dominant framings of the "active city." We invite papers engaging with how bodies in motion, whether through organised sport, daily commutes, or spontaneous play, become enrolled in urban governance regimes, property relations, and struggles over the right to the city.

Potential topics include but are not limited to: sport-led displacement and gentrification; mega-event planning, legacies, and labour configurations; datafied mobility and surveillance; climate adaptation and heat inequality; playground design and spatial autonomy of children; disability access and universal design; informal play and spatial appropriation; the care work of infrastructure maintenance; fitness platforms and biopolitical governance; wellness real estate and class restructuring; gender, safety, and public space; and Indigenous land claims around sporting facilities.

We particularly welcome comparative work across cities and regions, interdisciplinary approaches, and scholarship grounded in ethnographic, historical, or mixed methods. By centring critical perspectives on active urbanisms, this session aims to advance understanding of how movement infrastructures reproduce and challenge urban inequalities in the contemporary moment.

#40 Urban timescapes: mobilizing temporality as a critical lens to map urban inequalities

Session chair(s):

Loraine Kennedy (CNRS-CESAH, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Shakthi S.

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Conceptualizations of temporality provide an overarching framework for urban scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to question how the workings of time across scales–from the everyday to the epochal–are shaping key dimensions of contemporary urbanization. An increasingly integrated global economy, massive migration, transnational cultural exchange facilitated by internet platforms and the climate crisis are all forces that impact urbanisation processes, as well as the quotidian workings of city life, whether for employment, care, or leisure. In this panel, we will investigate the urban inequalities generated by these forces as temporal phenomena, both shaping and shaped by individual, collective and structural experiences of time.

This choice of framing aims to anchor temporality in debates in critical urban theory. It serves as a base to interrogate the still influential modernist paradigm that assumes that urbanization, like “development” more broadly, follows a linear pattern. We aim to disrupt this narrative by interrogating “timescapes” (Kitchin 2023) – the differentiated and unequal experiences of temporal regimes – in order to explore “pathways and possibilities for a more global urban studies” (Lawhon and Truelove, 2020).

Our reflections are guided by the large body of literature on temporalities, the most compelling of which go beyond time as history or calculation to examine socio-cultural engagements, how time is mediated, embodied and experienced (Burges and Elias 2016). Related strands of scholarship are concerned with futurity (Bunnell et al 2022; Chakkalakal and Ren 2022) and how digitalization, standing as a proxy for the current era, interfaces with urbanization (Datta 2022). Of particular relevance for this session is the idea that temporalities are produced, notably through the evolving relationship between time, technologies and socio-economic relations. As Kitchin (2023) argues, temporality is time that is not pre-given or universal but contingent, relational and heterogeneous. Temporalities both reflect and shape power dynamics, with individual experiences of time impacted by structural conditions while simultaneously driven by agential purpose (Sharma, 2014). Thus, temporality can be conceptualized as an intersectional type of social difference structured in specific political economic and geographical contexts.

For this panel, we invite papers that mobilize conceptualizations of temporality to interrogate the relationship between the social and the spatial in the persistence, contestation, and negotiation of urban inequalities, through empirical investigation in any geographical and regional context, but particularly those that are undergoing rapid urbanization. Also welcome are reflections that mobilize temporality as a critical lens to advance conceptual or theoretical propositions in relation to contemporary debates around inequality.
Thematic entry points can include (but are not limited to): types and conditions of work in globally connected urban economies, in relation to meanings and usages of time; rhythms and characteristics of the extension of the built environment; access to public services, particularly through the lens of ‘speed’ or ‘slowness’; politics and governance of futurity; evolving subjectivities related to urban life at the crossroads of past/present/future; articulations between modes of urbanisation and urban ecology; urban public spaces as sites for differentiated temporal engagements; and the short- and longer-term work of urban social movements.

#41 Urban Displacement and Housing Precarity: Rethinking Refuge in Cities

Session chair(s):

Nadine Khayat (American University of Beirut), David Kostenwein, Diana Garces Amaya

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

In the context of overlapping global crises—violent conflict, deepening inequality, and the escalating impacts of climate change—forced migration has reached unprecedented levels. By 2025, over 123 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, with more than 60 per cent residing in urban areas (UN-Habitat, 2025). This demographic shift is not only reshaping the physical and social fabric of cities, but also challenging conventional understandings of housing, urbanisation, and governance.

This panel examines the complex and dynamic relationship between urban displacement and housing precarity, with a focus on how refugees navigate urban environments. Recent scholarship conceptualises these dynamics through the lens of “refugee urbanism” (Darling, 2020), which captures the spatial, social, and political transformations that emerge when displacement becomes a long-term urban condition. Building on this framework, the session interrogates how neoliberalism, characterised by commodification, deregulation, and exclusion, interacts with displacement to produce new forms of urban marginality and resilience.

Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from urban studies, migration, and housing policy, the panel hopes to present empirically grounded approaches to studying the relationships between housing, governance structures, and everyday dwelling practices through the perspectives of urban refugees. In doing so, the session foregrounds the agency of displaced refugees and local actors in producing housing arrangements under conditions of uncertainty and sometimes violence.

Ultimately, the panel aims to rethink the concept of refuge in cities as constitutive of contemporary urban life, shifting the lens away from the frameworks of crises and exceptions. It hopes to contribute to broader debates on urban inequality, displacement, and the restructuring of housing systems under global neoliberalism.

We invite interventions that engage questions that address these frameworks, and provide below a list of entry points that work in this direction:

• How do refugees access housing and navigate staying in place in cities shaped by informality, fragmented governance, and market-driven logics?
• What role do social networks play, what kinds of hierarchies (e.g., gender, national) do they impose? How are these hierarchies reshapes through the negotiation of dwelling and staying in place?
• Where do the materialities of the city, the history of their neighborhoods, building typologies, and tenure arrangements figure in shaping refugee experiences of precarity or stability?
• How do humanitarian responses and state policies intersect, overlap, or contradict each other in the provision of shelter?
• How do legal infrastructures and governance frameworks, whether humanitarian, municipal, or national mediate access to shelter and influence the long-term integration or exclusion of refugees?

#42 Informality Beyond the Margins: Everyday Practices of Elites, State Power, and Contestation in Contemporary Cities.

Session chair(s):

Vivek Mishra (Brown University and Northeastern University), Gavin Shatkin (Northeastern University), Chen Zhang (Duke Kunshan University)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Cities often strive to “formalize” themselves in order to be recognized within the system of “world cities.” Yet the more cities appear “formal” in the eyes of global networks of power and ideas, the more they seem to produce multiple, subtle, and overlapping modes of informality within themselves. Informality has become a way of life in many cities (Alsayyad, 2004). Urban studies have long associated “informality” with poverty, marginality, and survival strategies of the poor and documented how subalterns engage in informal economic activities (e.g., street vending and waste picking), build informal housing and neighborhoods (e.g., urban villages and favelas), and create informal social and political networks.

However, informality is not just a realm of urban subalterns. Across cities worldwide, elites, including middle-class residents, developers, and multiple levels of state actors, also engage in varied forms of informal practices that violate planning regulations. This includes luxury apartments and farmhouses that violate land-use codes and zoning regulations, high-rise gated colonies built on wetlands or forest land, and unauthorized commercial development by major real estate developers. Here, we align with Azunre’s (2024) argument that studies of informality have largely neglected the role of elites in the production of informal spaces, creating a critical blind spot with significant implications for urban inequality, governance, sustainability, and social justice.

An emerging body of research has begun to examine the role of elites in the production of informality across contexts, including Hong Kong (Lai, 2015; Ho, 2024), Bogotá, Colombia (Martínez and Chiodelli, 2021), and Pakistan (Moatasim, 2019). However, there is still a need for a comparative, historically grounded, and theoretical understanding of everyday socio-spatial, cultural, and political-economic dimensions of how elite informality is produced and maintained in different contexts, and how these multiple forms of elite informality (re)shape urban power dynamics and (re)produce inequality. Therefore, this panel invites papers that explore how administrative, social, economic, and political elites use informal practices to navigate and/or circumvent state regulations. By zooming in on the role of elites in informal urban processes, this panel seeks to reorient debates on informality beyond questions of poverty and marginalization toward an understanding of informality as a constitutive feature of urban governance that cuts across class, geographic, and cultural identities. Such a conceptual reframe can reveal the interplay among informality, class, and power in shaping contemporary urban transformation and development.

In particular, we invite papers from different geographies that address the following questions/themes:

1. Elite informality and urban (in)equality: examines how elite-produced informal practices manifest and/or mitigate inequality — through their everyday self-governance, cultural, and discursive practices, and how they contest state power.
2. Informality and administrative and bureaucratic elites: traces how state agents are not only active consumers of informality, but also deploy governance repertoires such as exceptions, tolerance, selective enforcement, and categorization to negotiate and produce informality.
3. Informality and “formal” urban projects: How contemporary utopian urban projects and discourses around smart-city initiatives, bottom-up planning, climate adaptation or resilience, and anti-immigration urban design produce new forms of informality?

#43 Affordable Housing within Planetary Boundaries: Crossing East–West and North–South Divides

Session chair(s):

Petr Kodenko Kubala (Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences), Rebecca Cavicchia, Slavomíra Ferenčuhová

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

The increasingly acute crisis of urban housing affordability now intersects with the accelerating environmental emergency. Each challenge has generated a substantial body of research. On the one hand, housing scholars show how financialisation, rising rents, and displacement exacerbate socio-economic inequalities in cities. On the other hand, climate and environmental research traces the ecological footprint of the housing system—spanning operational emissions from heating, cooling, and lighting, as well as embodied emissions from materials and construction—with the buildings and construction sector accounting for roughly a third of energy (and process-related) CO₂ emissions globally. These research streams often run in parallel, with relatively few interconnections identified in empirical research and in urban and housing theorising. Yet an emerging body of work interrogates how policy instruments designed for decarbonisation—green building codes, energy-retrofit programmes, densification, and nature-based solutions—reconfigure affordability, tenure security, and displacement dynamics. For example, recent critical contributions warn of a “green” or “eco-social” paradox: well-intentioned ecological measures can raise rents, catalyse green gentrification, or trigger renovictions.

This session aims to stimulate discussion about the conditions under which green building, retrofits, standards, and financing models advance affordability. We welcome context-sensitive insights, provocative ideas, critical commentaries, theoretical propositions, and/or individual research experiences.

Against that backdrop, we propose a conversation that treats contexts on an equal footing, and thus we explicitly invite participants from Central and Eastern Europe and from the Global South and North to co-produce analyses across housing regimes and to think about the future of affordable and green housing in cities and beyond.

We thus invite papers that address the following questions/topics:

• Under what policy, market, and governance conditions do decarbonisation measures reduce emissions without raising rents or inducing displacement?
• What empirical evidence links specific green interventions to changes in rent levels, tenure security, and patterns of green gentrification?
• Which financing and ownership models align climate goals with long-term affordability, and which fail to do so — and why?
• How do outcomes of decarbonisation processes vary across housing regimes, tenure types, and geographies (especially in Central and Eastern Europe and across the Global South and North)?
• What kind of theories, concepts, and metrics or evaluation methods are needed to grasp decarbonisation and affordability at the same time?

#44 Graffiti and Street Art Between Community and Commerce

Session chair(s):

Maggie Kusenbach (University of South Florida, USA)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

From quick tags, stickers, or paste-ups to elaborate multi-story murals, graffiti and street art are ubiquitous on urban surfaces around the world. Originating from below and long ignored or criminalized, over the past two decades, these global artforms have increasingly captured the attention of community activists, public officials, and commercial actors alike who seek to influence and maximize their uses in different ways. Today, many cities feature a mixture of government policies and programs (e.g. legal walls), community and non-profit initiatives (e.g. festivals, jams), and private businesses (e.g. galleries) that promote graffiti and street art, giving rise to new urban coalitions, forms of engagement, challenges, and conflicts.

This session seeks to gather urban scholars from around the world to share and discuss research, thinking, and engagement regarding the questions listed below with interested colleagues. All theoretical frameworks, research designs, methods, and analytic approaches are welcome. I especially encourage colleagues who are working in, and/or on, underrepresented countries, metro regions, and urban communities to participate in the scholarly conversation. All presentations should be visually engaging yet do not need to follow conventional scripts. Graffiti and street art researchers around the globe are known for their creativity, mutual support, and eagerness to engage with others which we want to showcase and nurture in this session.

I invite papers that address the following questions and issues (among others):
- Is graffiti authentic and subversive by definition, is street art always contrived and established, or are both more complex and dynamic than is often assumed? In which ways do graffiti and street art overlap and influence each other in specific local scenes?
- Which roles do government, community, non-profit, and/or private actors play in graffiti and street art scenes today?
- What are the histories and impacts of graffiti and street art policies, programs, and events, such as legal walls or annual festivals?
- Given their growing popularity and commercial embrace, what remains public and inclusive about graffiti and/or street art, and what does not?
- In which ways do these artforms underpin existing urban inequalities or create new forms of exclusion? Specifically, how do graffiti and street art intersect with tourism and gentrification in local places?

#45 Rethinking the Household: New Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Urban Collective Life

Session chair(s):

Pranav Kuttaiah (University of California, Berkeley), Teresa Caldeira

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

A number of stylized statistical facts—falling birth-rates, rising educational aspirations, new modalities of welfare, complex patterns of mobility, explosions of rental housing, rising divorce rates, new cultural practices, novel income-generating and distributional strategies, and reworked languages of masculinity and femininity—all point to a fundamental shift: the reordering of household arrangements. This process is not the direct product of centralized design. Rather, a slow accumulation of minor alterations have quietly diffused to the point of constituting a new common sense. New ways of earning, of caring, of managing, of being in public have crept into daily life, not all at once but in hesitant, partial forms; together unsettling the stable category of the household.

Such macro-level phenomena have thus far been analyzed through broad-based instruments and surveys, moving from large structural claims down to individuals. The evolving relationships between work, home, and family in urban contexts, however, demands a framework capable of listening carefully to the emic logics that underlie everyday improvisations. It calls for a renewed vocabulary—grounded in empirical specificity yet attuned to translocal variation. We propose to think about this fundamental question from the opposite place: we start with our interlocutors, with the logics through which they explain their actions, and develop a qualitative orientation to emergent formations of collective life. This approach is animated by an ability to glean from silences, problematize absences, and think of alternative conditions of possibility through engagement with individual circumstances across different contexts. We define the problem-space as one of sensibilities—of describing and comparing how people learn, gradually, to live together differently.
Through this panel, we seek ethnographically-informed studies that examine the reconfiguration of urban households as sites of provisional belonging, dispersed labor, and negotiated authority. Rather than resorting to moral panics on the ‘decline’ of the family, we attend to how new forms of householding emerge as responses to—and instruments for navigating—the contradictions of contemporary urban life.

Some key themes include:
1.Changing forms of cohabitation, care work, rental practices, and income generation
2.Gendered dimensions of domestic labor, authority, and welfare administration
3.Digital mediation and intergenerational authority
4.Migration, mobility, and dispersed kinship networks
New modalities of labor and income distribution in household economies

By situating ethnographic cases in dialogue, the panel seeks to illuminate how pressures toward flexible arrangements unfold across distinct historical legacies, labor markets, and kinship systems.

Some theoretical directions include:
1.How should we theorize the tension between older teleologies of settlement and autoconstruction, and the emerging logics of transitoriness, mobility and provisional arrangement?
2. How is domestic authority reshaped when women increasingly manage households as income generators and welfare administrators, and what are the implications for urban political economies?
3. How do digital technologies reconfigure intergenerational authority, and what possibilities emerge for collective life?
We invite scholars studying household formations in cities using any methods but with fieldwork or ethnographic insight at the core, or with an interest in theorizing inductively and building new conceptual vocabularies to capture the complex and unstable nature of household life in urban economies today.

#46 Urban divides: Housing and income inequality in an era of uncertainty and transformation

Session chair(s):

Lutfun Nahar Lata (The University of Melbourne), Daniel Kudla, Andrew Clarke

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This panel explores the enduring and emerging dynamics of housing and income inequality in urban and regional contexts across the globe. As cities face intersecting crises, from economic precarity and climate change to post-pandemic recovery and geopolitical instability, questions of who can afford to live, work and thrive in urban spaces have become increasingly urgent. Housing and income inequalities are not merely socioeconomic outcomes, but are actively produced and maintained through state policies, financial logics, spatial planning, labour regimes and everyday practices of exclusion and resistance.

We invite contributions that critically examine how old and new forms of inequality manifest in housing markets, employment structures and urban governance. We are particularly interested in comparative or cross-regional analyses that reveal shared mechanisms and divergent trajectories in the global North and South. Papers might explore topics such as:

• The financialisation of housing and its impact on affordability and displacement
• Informal housing and labour markets in rapidly urbanising regions
• The spatialisation of inequality through zoning, planning and infrastructural neglect
• Rent burden, eviction and homelessness as expressions of structural violence
• Urban social movements and policy interventions that contest inequality
• The racialised, gendered or classed dimensions of housing and income precarity
• New methodological or theoretical approaches to studying housing and income inequality

We welcome scholars from diverse disciplines (e.g., sociology, geography, urban planning, political science and anthropology) and from varied methodological backgrounds (e.g., ethnography, spatial analysis, survey, participatory research and critical theory). By bringing together global perspectives, this panel aims to foster comparative dialogue to illuminate both the specificity and generality of inequality in urban and regional life and to collectively imagine strategies for more just urban futures.

#47 Collective Urban Praxis: Relational and Transformative Approaches to Challenging Urban Inequalities

Session chair(s):

Hugo López (University of Sheffield (UK) and TU Delft Centre for the Just City (NL)), Cristian Olmos Herrera, Juliana Gonçalves, Caroline Newton

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This panel invites contributions that interrogate and experiment with the methodological and pedagogical dimensions of academic engagement for collective urban action. It brings together scholars and practitioners who use research and education as sites for cultivating solidarity, recognition, and transformative spatial practices. In light of the conference’s theme, “Inequalities and the City. Old Issues, New Challenges”, the session foregrounds the ways in which persistent and emerging urban inequalities are not only analysed but actively challenged, disrupted and politicised, through participatory, embodied, and co-creative modes of inquiry.

Urban inequalities manifest differently across Global North, South, and East contexts, yet share common roots in colonial legacies, neoliberal policies, and exclusionary planning practices. This panel explicitly seeks to centre voices and methodologies from the Global South and East, recognising how innovative approaches to urban research and pedagogy often emerge from contexts of resource constraints and social movements fighting for spatial justice.

In many contexts, participatory approaches have been institutionalised, often losing their transformative edge and becoming procedural rather than political. This panel seeks to recover the radical potential of engagement by exploring situated pedagogies and collaborative methodologies that operate beyond extractive research or consultation logics. We invite reflections on how design studios, artistic and critical research, and spatial practices can become forms of collective rehearsal, prefigurative action and concrete utopias , sites where recognition, resistance, and relational learning are enacted.

Central questions include:

• How can collaborative methodologies challenge rather than merely document urban inequalities?
• What forms of co-making and co-becoming can unsettle traditional hierarchies between expert/participant, teacher/learner, researcher/community and simultaneously challenge the colonial dimension of knowledge production?
• How can relational and sensory methodological innovations from the Global South(such as decolonial mapping, community storytelling, performative documentation, or film) inform and transform urban research practices globally, contributing to more ethical, inclusive, and transformative urban knowledge?
• What does it mean to “learn solidarity and justice” through spatial research and practice in contexts shaped by different stories of injustice and inequality?

The panel particularly encourages papers that present methodological innovations (including visual, narrative, sonic, or embodied approaches) that challenge dominant Western academic frameworks and that reflect critically on the ethics, politics, and pedagogy of engagement. Contributions may include case studies of collaborative projects, decolonial and feminist practices, speculative methodologies, or theoretical explorations of recognition, care, and relationality in spatial research.
By bringing together perspectives from different contexts and traditions, the session aims to contribute to an emerging transdisciplinary discourse on engaged urban approaches.

#48 Beyond the local turn. Theorizing and researching migration governance in cities.

Session chair(s):

Karolina Łukasiewicz (Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw), Marta Pachocka, Karolina Podgórska

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Since the 1990s, interest in local-level migration governance has grown among scholars and practitioners. The so-called ‘local turn’ in migration studies, or ‘new localism’ in urban studies, has revealed various forms and mechanisms that influence migration governance, primarily in the Global North cities (McGuirk et al., 2021; Zapata-Barrero, Caponio, Scholten, 2017; Schiller & Çağlar, 2009). Migration governance, which involves managing migration through state (public) and non-state (e.g, non-profit civil society or for-profit) actors at the local level, has gained significant attention in European public discourse and academic debates, prompting responses from actors at the supranational, national, and local levels (Geddes et al., 2019; Caponio et al., 2018; Pisarevskaya & Scholten, 2025; Çağlar & Schiller, 2023). Much is known about local-level policies being more efficient and innovative than central-level responses to residents’ needs (Oosteslynck & Kazepov, 2019). Yet, local-level policies struggle with underfunding, coordinating fragmented services provided by multiple actors, and can contribute to deepening inequalities for residents (Łukasiewicz et al. 2021).

The scholarship on local-level responses to migration beyond single case studies or in contexts beyond Western Europe and North America remains scattered. In this panel, we invite participants who have taken on this challenge and can share the varying ways in which they approached the theoretical and methodological challenges of analyzing migration governance in cities and smaller localities, including comparative studies and those that extend beyond the Global North Context.

The authors will answer:
• How did they theorise their findings?
• What methodological strategies did they use to analyse the empirical material they collected around migration in various large, medium, and small localities?
• What challenges did they experience in their analysis, and how did they address them?
• The panel participants will also discuss synergies in their work and ways to collaborate on further developing local-level scholarship, including theoretically, methodologically, across various geographical areas, and academic fields that have so far been overlooked in the local turn scholarship.

We invite presentations related to the following conference themes: Migration, Governance, Recent developments in theory

#49 The Janus face of urban social mix: The social effects of segregation at the micro scale (Urban Micro-segregation)

Session chair(s):

Thomas Maloutas (National Centre for Social Research), Robert Musil (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Stavros Spyrellis (National Centre for Social Research)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Urban micro-segregation – segregation at the micro scale, i.e., below the neighbourhood level – is a neglected but emerging topic in segregation studies. Neglected because the segregation studies have been traditionally focused on the neighbourhood scale; emerging because more and more evidence on social (or ethnic and racial) hierarchies at the micro scale (within building blocks or apartment buildings) is provided by urban research from many cities across the world. This evidence reveals that social mix can have many different facets and, eventually, different social consequences/outputs. It also raises questions about the importance of social hierarchies at the micro scale and their importance for reproducing or apeasing social inequalities. In this way, it brings back the discussion about the relation between social and spatial proximity, providing new evidence that spatial proximity can produce both bridges and barriers to social proximity, depending on policy and other parameters related to specific contexts.

The proposed Regular Panel is seeking to provide further eveince of micro-segregation structures and, mainly, on their social effects/outcomes. Different forms of urban micro-segregation –like vertical segregation within apartment blocks, segregation between façade and back-street apartments or housing units on main strreets/avenus and back streets and alleys, etc.– and their consequences on social inequalities and any kind of discrimination are welcome to this panel.

The proposed Panel is a follow-up of several publications (Logan, J. R. & Bellman, B. Before The Philadelphia Negro: residential segregation in a nineteenth-century northern city. Soc. Sci. Hist. 40, 683–706 (2016); Logan, J. R. & Martinez, M. J. The spatial scale and spatial configuration of residential settlement: measuring segregation in the Postbellum South. Am. J. Sociol. 123, 1161–1203 (2018); Maloutas, T. & Karadimitriou, N. (eds) Vertical Cities. Micro-Segregation, Social Mix and Urban Housing Markets (Edward Elgar, 2022); Maloutas, T., Lin, S. & Logan, J.R. (eds) Urban Micro-segregation, A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X) https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land/special_issues/938S2A99L1 (2024)); of a workshop at the Institue for Urban and Regional Research (ISR) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Oeaw) in Vienna, under the title: Urban micro-segregation on September 12, 2025.

The proposed Panel aims to provide a space to discuss new and cutting-edge findings on this topic. We invite papers that address the following questions/topics:

1. Conceptual debate on the contradiction between micro-segregation and social mix.
2. Empirical insights on the patterns of microsegregation and its social implications within neighbourhoods.
3. Discussion on the urban context (school system, public space and infrastructure policies) that foster/dissolve social hierarchies and inequalities on the microscale.
4. Innovative methodological approaches to measure social proximity (and social distance) at the micro scale.
5. Implication for urban social, housing and planning strategies/policies focused on improving co-habitation and inclusiveness.

#50 Mapping Meaning: The Potential of Qualitative GIS and Participatory Mapping for Urban Studies

Session chair(s):

Micaela Mancini (Gran Sasso Science Institute), Hannah Grove

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Geospatial tools like GIS have been central to urban studies, particularly in revealing and visualising patterns of inequalities. They have enabled scholars and policymakers to map e.g. accessibility to services, processes of spatial segregation, environmental patterns of injustice with a certain degree of precision and comparison. Yet, they tend to privilege the quantifiable and measurable. Urban inequalities, however, are lived and embodied in ways that are not easily captured by conventional cartography: marginalised voices, invisible boundaries, informal practices and contestations of space do not ‘find space' in these representations, as they are often difficult to quantify or make visible in conventional/traditional maps.

Quantitative GIS risks flattening lived experience into standardised layers, reducing complexity to aggregated metrics. It can also reproduce exclusions, by leaving out those whose presence is not well captured in official datasets, e.g. residents of informal settlements, precarious workers, those whose attachments, memories and subjective experiences are not recorded. By presenting space as ‘fixed’ conventional mapping risks reinforcing the very inequalities it seeks to expose.

This session proposes a critical interrogation of how participatory mapping and qualitative GIS can open up more nuanced, spatially grounded and socially just approaches to studying inequalities in the city. The point is not only to ‘add more data’, but to ‘mobilise different lenses’: ways of seeing, hearing, and mapping what often remains off the official grid. We argue that this is essential for capturing a sense of place, peripheral experiences, temporalities, memories, while foregrounding the co-production of space between researchers and communities. Integrating these approaches is essential to urban scholarship that aims not only to represent inequality, but to question the politics of representation itself. This session aims at bringing together scholars who are experimenting with such critical and creative lenses, in order to critique current practice, and to chart methodological and ethical paths forward. In other words, to ‘map meaning’ together.

We invite contributions along three interconnected threads:

- On epistemologies: how can participatory mapping and qualitative GIS shift knowledge production in urban studies away from top-down methodologies? How are power, authority and inclusion negotiated in mapping processes? Who draws the map, who names the places, whose stories are rendered visible or neglected?
- On methods and creativity: what kinds of qualitative-data-rich, spatially grounded tools are being used, adapted, invented? What are the trade-offs in scale, representation, usability?
- On ethics: what ethical dilemmas arise around spatial literacy, expectations, care, and ownership of data in these processes?
- On impact: beyond data collection and representation, how can participatory mapping and qualitative GIS lead to deeper understanding, community empowerment, policy implications or resistance? What opportunities and challenges arise when trying to embed this type of evidence into policy?

#51 Bourdieu in the Southern City: Between Social Divisions and Urban Inequalities

Session chair(s):

Nat Marom (Sciences Po), Aparna Das

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Pierre Bourdieu’s work continues to grow in prominence among urban sociologists and the wider urban studies community. However, with some exceptions, his ideas have not been put to work in the context of Global South cities, particularly to explore how social distinctions and divisions shape urban spaces, inequalities, and informalities. In his recent book “Bourdieu in the City”, Loïc Wacquant asserts that Bourdieu provides “conceptual levers… to the study of cities of the Global South by sketching an analytic that bridges the gap between continents” (2023:5). Could this be reconciled with the “Southern turn” in urban scholarship, which calls for “new geographies of theory” (Roy 2009) and “homegrown” concepts more attuned to the diverse contexts of the Global South? While acknowledging the obvious discrepancy in using a European “grand theorist” to generate context-specific Southern urban theory – this session hopes to collectively explore whether and how Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus could indeed become a generative source for novel explorations on and from Southern cities.

To give an idea from India, Bourdieu’s concepts manifest in various forms across disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, literature, or even in film and music. For instance, in literature, the concept of ‘habitus’ has been explored in detail, where the body language of urban and village dwellers is described in a nuanced manner. These descriptions shape their positioning within the social hierarchy, which may or may not align with their economic power. However, concepts such as distinction, taste, social capital, or symbolic power tend to be overlooked in urban scholarship. The urban is often portrayed as a neutral, foreign geography – utopian habitats where everyone is supposed to be equal, governed by agnostic institutions that remain unresponsive to local sensibilities and dispositions. This is reflected in the aspiration to build functional housing blocks and supposedly neutral public spaces, based on the belief that well-governed urban areas are devoid of the ‘evils’ associated with village life, such as caste, traditional authority, etc. This session aims to explore this gap.

As urban scholars and practitioners from the North and South, who have used some of Bourdieu’s ideas to frame our research of cities in India and South Africa, we are looking for like-minded explorers who have found Bourdieu fruitful in their own work. We are keen to convene contributions that pragmatically apply any of Bourdieu’s many concepts (social space, symbolic power, field, capital, habitus, distinction, practice, doxa, etc.) to the urban South, as well as comparatively across the North/South gap. We welcome papers that address diverse urban themes and problematics, with an emphasis on social divisions and urban inequalities (e.g. informal settlements, urban marginality, deindustrialization, segregation, gentrification, political conflict, urban environmental justice, planning, policing). Papers are welcome to apply or combine different methodologies. We seek papers that offer a distinct yet flexible Bourdieusian framing of Southern urbanism – applying and reshaping his concepts to the realities of 21st century urbanization in the majority world. We hope that this session could lead to the publication of a themed issue.

#52 Algorithmic Governance and Urban Belonging: Emerging Politics, Infrastructures, and Practices in the Platform City

Session chair(s):

Dr. Muhammet Esat Tiryaki (Technical University Berlin), Dr. Lutfun Nahar Lata, Aman Hashir

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Research on platform urbanism has shown how algorithms reorganise labour relations and reshape urban economies (Lata, 2025; Lata and Copolov, 2025). Yet in cities, these systems also influence who feels they belong, who gains access to space/services, and how people engage politically. As algorithms mediate access to housing, mobility, and work, they create new geographies of inequality that reshape long-standing social and spatial divides. This session examines how algorithmic governance—from predictive policing and automated benefit systems to platform labour and smart city infrastructures—reconfigures the everyday politics and practices of belonging within urban life.

We approach belonging as a relational practice enacted through interactions with digital infrastructures embedded in the city’s material fabric. Algorithmic governance operates through ratings, rankings, verification, geo-fencing, and risk scoring, structuring how people access services, navigate space, and encounter one another. These mechanisms generate ‘digital shadows’—the often invisible processes that shape who is recognised, trusted, and excluded in everyday life. These dynamics reveal how algorithmic governance structures visibility and access, where some populations become hyper-visible to data systems while others remain unseen.

The session conceptualises algorithmic governance as a constant adjustment between automated regulation and human improvisation, revealing how digital systems are sustained and contested in daily life. Everyday practices of compliance, resistance, workaround, and invention reveal how people inhabit and challenge algorithmic systems, producing new attachments, exclusions, and forms of political agency. Focusing on these engagements, we foreground the affective and spatial dimensions of belonging—the ways in which algorithmic governance shapes who can move, dwell, or participate in urban life.

Empirically, we invite contributions examining diverse sites of algorithmic governance, including ride-hailing, food delivery, care and cleaning platforms, housing and welfare portals, warehouse logistics, short-term rentals, and smart city infrastructures. These domains illustrate how data-driven decision-making and platform interfaces reorganise work, housing, and mobility, redefining what it means to belong in the platform city. We welcome comparative perspectives exploring how these dynamics manifest differently, revealing patterns of inequality and exclusion.
Methodologically, we encourage approaches combining ethnography, interviews, and digital methods with algorithmic auditing, collaborative mapping, and data visualisation to make visible the opaque workings of algorithmic governance while centring the experiences of those most affected.
Focusing on the intersection of algorithmic governance, belonging, and inequality, this session contributes to RC21’s theme, “Inequalities and the City. Old Issues, New Challenges”, by showing how algorithmic governance reorganises economic and spatial relations and reshapes the lived politics and practices of belonging in the platform city.

We invite papers addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:
• Everyday negotiations of algorithmic governance: ratings,rankings,dispatch,de/activation,shadow bans,geo-fencing,and verification,and their implications for access,visibility,and exclusion
• Infrastructures of belonging: how payments,ID verification,insurance, or navigation systems mediate attachment,access,and exclusion
• Platform labour and urban space: how gig work and mobility platforms reshape everyday geographies of inequality and belonging
• Smart-city infrastructures and data-driven decision-making: how algorithmic governance transforms participation,recognition,and urban inequality
• Comparative perspectives on algorithmic governance,belonging, and inequality across diverse urban contexts

#53 Wealth in Action: Extraction, Finance, and the Making of Global Urbanism

Session chair(s):

Michael Lukas (Universidad de Chile), Corinna Hoelzl (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), David Kornbluth

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This panel seeks to advance a comparative urban political economy agenda by focusing on the production and reproduction of wealth as a driver of urban change across different regions of the world. While different forms of poverty, informality, displacement and everyday practices are well researched topics in urban studies, far less attention has been paid to the role of wealth actors - such as locally embedded yet transnationally networked families, firms, funds and state-linked entities - in reshaping cities and specific (global) urban territories.

We invite analyses of how transnational finance, extractive urbanisation, logistics and platform infrastructures, rentierisation and green capitalism organise the capture of value, expand assetisation and draw popular spaces and livelihoods into extractive circuits of capital. By tracing the nexus between wealth accumulation and spatial production, the panel also examines how financialisation and climate/energy finance reshape property regimes, infrastructures, and ecologies, thereby entrenching old and new inequalities while also provoking counter-hegemonic practices. Comparative, historically informed and mixed-methods approaches are encouraged. By re-centring the contested geographies of wealth as processes, practices and relations, the panel contributes to debates on how extractive dynamics might be redirected toward just socio-ecological transformation and post-extractivist forms of global urbanism.

In particular, we invite papers that address the following questions:

What new financial and legal instruments are driving contemporary forms of urban extractivism—such as special purpose vehicles, public–private partnerships, development rights, or nature-based offset schemes—and how do they reorganize power relations between domestic elites, transnational investors and the state?
In what ways do “ordinary cities” or so-called “global cities from off the map” participate in global wealth chains, and how do they mediate the (trans)national extraction, circulation and capture of value beyond established financial hubs?
What new peripheries, dependencies and spatial inequalities are produced through current cycles of extraction, financialisation and green capitalism, and how do these processes reconfigure North–South and intra-national geographies of wealth and power?
How does the consolidation of wealth among corporate and financial actors reorganize the practices and discourses of urban planning, and what new modes of territorial contestation emerge in response?
Which counter-movements and socio-ecological projects are prefiguring post-extractive urban futures, and how do they navigate or reshape existing regimes of property, finance, and territorial governance?

#54 Urban Cohesion and Experiences of Insecurity

Session chair(s):

Maria Luisa Méndez Layera (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), Quentin Ramond

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Social, economic and environmental inequalities, such as unaffordable housing, uneven distribution of economic resources, unequal access to green space and unfair exposure to environmental pollution, are long-standing problematiques affecting cities, as amply articulated by the wealth of publications in the field of urban studies. However, the ways in which these problems are understood and addressed may vary across different levels of government. Indeed, cities sometimes pursue policy agendas that may differ from those set at regional and national levels. What is more, cities may make up for the lack of state’s intervention, dealing with those issues that are overlooked by central governments.ç

A case in point is the divergence in policy approaches adopted by local governments in relation to key issues such as migration, housing, and climate change. In the field of migration, several local authorities have implemented integration-oriented policies that stand in contrast to the more restrictive and securitised approaches pursued at the national level. With regard to housing, local governments have sought to devise responses to the housing crisis that have been largely neglected in national policy agendas. Similarly, in the area of climate change, cities have undertaken adaptation strategies aimed at increasing urban resilience, often in response to the limited or inadequate action characterising national environmental policies. These examples illustrate how, sometimes, city governments operate in misalignment with the national government, revealing the piecemeal or even inadequate ability of the state to identify and address urban problematiques.

At the local level, such policies may—or may not—be conceived, designed and implemented in collaboration with, in response to, or under pressure from a range of economic and social actors who often urge local governments to respond more directly to their constituencies. In this sense, cities’ political actions cannot be viewed solely as those of local governments, but rather as the outcome of coordination, lobbying, collaboration, conflict and contestation within urban society. This includes local governments, social movements, economic actors, and transnational networks that influence city-level policymaking.

In this panel, we focus on the analysis of “rebel cities” (Harvey 2012), which address urban inequalities in opposition to, or with limited involvement of the state. Therefore, we propose to examine the central-local contentions emerging in the design and delivery of social and environmental policy at urban level. We seek contributions examining the tensions - and even conflicts – fuelled by the attempts of cities to independently tackle thorny urban issues (i.e. housing, migration, pollution etc.). We welcome theoretical elaborations of state-local conflict in addressing pressing urban problematiques as well as empirical cases of policy contention in cities located in both the Global North and South. Additionally, we invite papers examining how different urban public, private and civic actors, contribute to this disagreement, placing themselves in opposition to top-down policies. As such, the panel will allow for a discussion on the political agency of urban actors in interpreting and addressing urban issues in relation to, and often in contestation with, central state actors.

#55 Cities and States: Central-local conflict in the fight against urban inequalities

Session chair(s):

Elisabetta Mocca (Department of Sociology, University of Salamanca), Iolanda Bianchi

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Social, economic and environmental inequalities, such as unaffordable housing, uneven distribution of economic resources, unequal access to green space and unfair exposure to environmental pollution, are long-standing problematiques affecting cities, as amply articulated by the wealth of publications in the field of urban studies. However, the ways in which these problems are understood and addressed may vary across different levels of government. Indeed, cities sometimes pursue policy agendas that may differ from those set at regional and national levels. What is more, cities may make up for the lack of state’s intervention, dealing with those issues that are overlooked by central governments.ç

A case in point is the divergence in policy approaches adopted by local governments in relation to key issues such as migration, housing, and climate change. In the field of migration, several local authorities have implemented integration-oriented policies that stand in contrast to the more restrictive and securitised approaches pursued at the national level. With regard to housing, local governments have sought to devise responses to the housing crisis that have been largely neglected in national policy agendas. Similarly, in the area of climate change, cities have undertaken adaptation strategies aimed at increasing urban resilience, often in response to the limited or inadequate action characterising national environmental policies. These examples illustrate how, sometimes, city governments operate in misalignment with the national government, revealing the piecemeal or even inadequate ability of the state to identify and address urban problematiques.

At the local level, such policies may—or may not—be conceived, designed and implemented in collaboration with, in response to, or under pressure from a range of economic and social actors who often urge local governments to respond more directly to their constituencies. In this sense, cities’ political actions cannot be viewed solely as those of local governments, but rather as the outcome of coordination, lobbying, collaboration, conflict and contestation within urban society. This includes local governments, social movements, economic actors, and transnational networks that influence city-level policymaking.

In this panel, we focus on the analysis of “rebel cities” (Harvey 2012), which address urban inequalities in opposition to, or with limited involvement of the state. Therefore, we propose to examine the central-local contentions emerging in the design and delivery of social and environmental policy at urban level. We seek contributions examining the tensions - and even conflicts – fuelled by the attempts of cities to independently tackle thorny urban issues (i.e. housing, migration, pollution etc.). We welcome theoretical elaborations of state-local conflict in addressing pressing urban problematiques as well as empirical cases of policy contention in cities located in both the Global North and South. Additionally, we invite papers examining how different urban public, private and civic actors, contribute to this disagreement, placing themselves in opposition to top-down policies. As such, the panel will allow for a discussion on the political agency of urban actors in interpreting and addressing urban issues in relation to, and often in contestation with, central state actors.

#56 Grassroots Territorial Strategies in Urban Peripheries

Session chair(s):

Ana Clara Monteiro-Macedo (Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos - IESP/UERJ), Júnior Pimentel, Lino Texeira

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Grassroots territorial strategies developed by groups, organizations, and social movements in favelas and urban peripheries are central features of cities in the so-called Global South, both historically and in the present. In contexts shaped by deep social and spatial inequalities, especially for Black and peripheral populations, collective mobilizations around political agendas, the struggle for rights, and the affirmation of ways of life challenge the dominant logic of urban space production.

This session aims to foster debate on the multiple territorial strategies emerging from peripheral contexts, educational experiences, cultural practices, knowledge production, and other territorially rooted initiatives, and their capacity to influence urban production and public policies. By articulating different spheres of action and combining local and broader scales, these practices transcend the boundaries of their territories and reverberate across society, calling for a reexamination of the role of the university itself.
We welcome research, completed or in progress, addressing the implications of grassroots territorial practices and collective mobilization in favelas and urban peripheries, especially in relation to:

i. Knowledge production and engagement with public data;
ii. Popular mobilization and rights-based agendas;
iii. Self-managed territorial and organizational practices;
iv. Political advocacy and strategies of influence;
v. Artistic practices and cultural politics;
vi. Heritage and memory;
vii. Socio-environmental agendas;
viii. Care networks and the valuing of life.

#57 Provocations from the Field: Methodological Innovation and Theorizsing Urban Inequalities from the Global South

Session chair(s):

Reeham Mourad (University of Illinois at Chicago), Madhuvani Yella, Chetna Kuanr

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Studying urban and rural inequalities in today’s Global South requires confronting profound complexity. These landscapes are shaped by historical, socio-material, and scalar processes that overlap, coincide, and clash—intensified by the continuous movement of people, capital, and ideas. This reality unsettles the theoretical and methodological foundations of urban studies.
While larger theoretical frameworks are evolving beyond the theoretical imperialism of the Global North, both conceptual and empirical grounds remain difficult to navigate. Southern realities are characterized by Multi-dimensional inequalities that compound rather than simply add up; Layered tensions, power dynamics, and dispossessions that resist disentanglement; Unique, historically embedded contextualities that defy universal explanation; and the embodied, lived experiences of these complexities, where structural chaos is internalized, navigated, and resisted in everyday life.
Faced with this, what knowledge can PhD researchers produce to meaningfully explain embedded inequalities? We argue that methodological creativity and provocation are essential to develop situated knowledges that are empirically, politically, and conceptually nuanced.
Ethnography serves as a crucial starting point—prioritizing depth, context, and lived experience through encounter and thick description. Yet we are particularly interested in how ethnography is being stretched beyond its traditional, place-bound conventions to account for circulatory, digital, and multi-scalar phenomena. The central innovation we explore is not ethnography itself, but how it is extended, hybridized, and placed in critical conversation with other methods.
We contend that for PhD researchers in the Global South, methodological creativity is not a luxury but a necessity. This panel centers “situated methodological provocations”—the rigorous, reflexive creative labor of researchers working in complex fieldsites. We seek explorations of how researchers mix, adapt, and reinvent methods to connect granular fieldwork to larger political and structural forces. These innovations can take a variety of forms, including combining methods, stretching across time, jumping between scales, and repurposing technology.
We invite contributions that grapple with questions such as:
What methodological provocations are PhD students using to study complex urban and rural phenomena?
How does reflexivity about positionality shape the design and execution of creative methodologies?
How can innovative fieldwork practices reveal embedded inequalities and opportunities?
In what ways can methods themselves generate new categories and concepts that defy inherited frameworks?
How can we think beyond the bounded “case” to treat objects, processes, and sites as distinct—yet recombinable—analytic options?
This panel aims to advance a collective rethinking of methodology as a primary tool for theorizing from the South.
Studying urban and rural inequalities in today’s Global South requires confronting profound complexity. These landscapes are shaped by historical, socio-material, and scalar processes that overlap, coincide, and clash—intensified by the continuous movement of people, capital, and ideas. This reality unsettles the theoretical and methodological foundations of urban studies.
While larger theoretical frameworks are evolving beyond the theoretical imperialism of the Global North, both conceptual and empirical grounds remain difficult to navigate. Southern realities are characterized by Multi-dimensional inequalities that compound rather than simply add up; Layered tensions, power dynamics, and dispossessions that resist disentanglement; Unique, historically embedded contextualities that defy universal explanation; and the embodied, lived experiences

#58 Old and new geographies of urban thirst: Tracing water conflicts and hydrosocial inequalities in the climate emergency

Session chair(s):

Gala Nettelbladt (Bauhaus University Weimar), Lucia Alexandra Popartan, Francesca Ferlicca

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

The global water crisis does not seem to be going anywhere: As cities worldwide are profoundly reshaped by depleting water resources, living with too little water has long been common in some, while it is relatively new in others. In Europe, as the South is experiencing increasingly devastating droughts, the historically water-rich North is confronted with altered rainfall patterns and shrinking aquifers. In much of the Global South, the struggle with under-supply and infrastructural neglect has long defined everyday urban life, making water crisis a chronic condition of inequality.

Cities remain intensely thirsty, as Filippo Menga reminds us (2025). Urban agendas continue to rely on growth-oriented logics such as densification, investments into new data storage centres, tourism or the push of renaturing, all of which demand ever more water. However, while ‘water scarcity’ is a popular buzz-expression in both contemporary mainstream academic and policy talk, it only seems to inspire supply-oriented fixes, such as desalination plants, which conceal socio-political and environmental tensions around, and uneven distributions of, scarcity. As emergency narratives of singular catastrophic moments and unsurpassable deadlines have successfully transformed dominant understandings of human relationships with water into a spectacle (ibid., 31), this spectacularisation of the water crisis serves the conceptual toolkit of capital, stabilising the very system which caused the emergency in the first place (Kaika et al. 2023).

This session explores how ‘urban thirst’ in the climate emergency is being produced, experienced, governed and resisted. In what ways do urban water crises intersect with planning traditions, political economies, infrastructures as well as temporalities and imaginaries of the urban? To what extend do experiences of environmental trauma and grief or the politics of calculating and measuring water hinge on the way we understand scarcity? What socio-political and socio-technical conflicts emerge? We invite papers that engage with the uneven geographies of urban thirst, old and new. We are particularly interested in papers that challenge the depoliticized language of scarcity, seeking contributions that foreground the socio-political, cultural, and ecological dimensions of scarcity.

We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives from urban and rural sociology, human geography, planning and urban political ecology on individual or comparative case studies, as well as the scalar entanglements of water politics, e.g. household, watershed, municipal bylaws, financial flows. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• New empirical case studies on urban water crises
• Discourses, imaginaries, narratives of ‘water scarcity’
• Temporalities, histories and path-dependencies of urban thirst
• Resistance and mobilisation around urban thirst
• Theoretical and methodological innovations to study ‘water scarcity’
• More-than-human perspectives on urban waterscapes
• Case studies of planning instruments and policy experiments, top-down & bottom-up

References
Kaika, M., Keil, R., Mandler, T. Tzaninis Y. (eds). 2023. Turning up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Menga, F. 2025. Thirst: The Global Quest to Solve the Water Crisis. London: Verso.

#59 Living with the Weather: Everyday Adaptations to Rain, Heat and Climate Governance

Session chair(s):

Susana Neves Alves (Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals - Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona), Kim West

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Extreme weather – heatwaves, chronic heat or rain, extreme precipitation, and flooding – is reshaping urban life across Europe. A changing climate is transforming bodily, domestic everyday experiences of city life, while also reshaping governance systems, urban infrastructures and urbanization processes. In response, mainstream urban adaptation planning has largely relied on technocratic, homogenous, expert-led imaginaries to mitigate the impacts of climate change. The problematic outcomes of these approaches (eg. green gentrification) are well documented.

In return, a growing scholarship is exploring ideas of ‘transformative’ and ‘everyday’ adaptation to develop justice-focused and situated approaches. These perspectives aim at transforming the socio-economic and political structures that produce vulnerability. In this panel, we are interested in participatory and everyday adaptations – ways of doing grounded in lived experiences that hold the potential to be disruptive and generative – with particular emphasis to practices and ideas coming from marginalised communities, neighbourhoods and geographies.

We invite contributions that explore everyday adaptations – the “small, incremental changes made in our daily lives to accommodate the shifting ecologies in which we live” (Castro and Sen 2022:2) – whether in response to climate events themselves or institutional adaptation strategies. We aim to examine how these practices open new ways of understanding and enacting urban adaptation.

We welcome conitrbutions that address the following questions:

-How can everyday approaches contribute insights to localised, justice-oriented ways of practicing adaptation?

-In what ways can everyday adaptations be examples of transformative adaptation? Can they inform practices of collaboration and co-production of knowledge between marginalised communities and policy-makers or researchers?

-How do everyday adaptations challenge social hierarchies, or reconfigure local infrastructures of care and support?

-What new adaptation imaginaries are emerging from everyday adaptation practices?

Castro, B, and R. Sen. 2022. ‘Everyday Adaptation: Theorizing Climate Change Adaptation in Daily Life’. Global Environmental Change 75:102555.

#60 Uncertain domesticities: gendered geographies of home-making and displacement

Session chair(s):

Laura Neville (University College London), Yasna Contreras

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Within feminist scholarship on ‘critical geographies of the home’ (Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Brickell, 2011), urban domesticities have been conceptualised as ‘homemaking in the city’ (Blunt & Sheringham 2018), as an inherently political ‘elastic space’ shaped through affects and experiences (Aedo 2023). As domesticities become entangled to experiences of migration and displacement, the making of home out of new dwellings spaces is further sustained by emotional and gendered labour (Oruc 2025; Rottmann & Sezginalp Özçetin 2024). From the perspective of labour-migration regimes, the insertion of production dynamics within the domestic sphere (Martella & Amann 2022), or the blurred spatialities of labour/home within ‘gendered disciplinary apparatuses’ (Antona 2023) has sustained the production of ‘carceral domesticities’ (Krishnan & Antona 2023). At the same time, new reconfigurations of everyday processes of digitalisation and the gendered production of smart homes (Chen et al., 2024) are unfolding, extending other modes of contemporary blurring of the boundaries of domestic and urban space (Martella & Enia, 2020).

This session seeks to examine the politics of continuity and rupture that sustain the shifting and ephemeral temporalities of domesticities through the lens of displacement and migration. How are domesticities reimagined from the fragile, ephemeral geographies of home, that embody the everyday realities of displacement? How are gendered and racialised experiences of domesticities, as a place of perpetual uncertainty, as anticipation (Krishnan & Antona 2023), entwined with forms of emplacements (Bjarnesen and Vigh, 2016)? This session seeks to explore the intimate spaces of the home; the uneven and unequal politics of intimacy and homemaking that are shaped through the embodied and everyday experiences of displacement and migration in the city.

This session seeks to engage with the uncertainty entwined with urban domesticities, which is rooted in the tension of (dis)-placement, and seeks to engage in a conversation on how the embodied acts of making home across spaces and temporalities might be productive to thinking of the (re)production of urban inequalities along dimensions of gender, class, caste, race, sexuality. In this session, we invite contributions from human geography, urban studies, feminist theory, social anthropology, migration studies, that critically engage with the following themes:

- Urban belonging/disbelonging
- Intersectional struggles
- Affect and emotions
- Labour-migration regimes
- Border cities and borderlands
- Environmental risks and harms
- Digitalisation and surveillance
- Smart and AI homes

#61 Damaged Landscapes: The Politics of Care in Cities of Accumulated Risk

Session chair(s):

Marat Nevlyutov (Affiliated Researcher, "Auditoria" Independent Research Initiative (Yerevan)), Nata Volkova

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

In an era of overlapping crises, cities worldwide are becoming landscapes of accumulated risk. The scars of conflict, industrial decline, and environmental degradation create urban environments where vulnerability is woven into the fabric of daily life. These damaged landscapes challenge us to look beyond conventional approaches to urban studies—beyond single disasters and linear recovery—and instead examine how communities learn to live with perpetual uncertainty.

This panel engages directly with the conference theme of "Inequalities and the City" by exploring a crucial dynamic: how systemic risks both deepen social vulnerabilities and inspire innovative practices of care. We focus on what we term "reparative infrastructures"—the daily social practices, political mobilizations, and ethical negotiations that sustain life in compromised urban environments. These are not merely technical solutions but fundamental reimaginings of citizenship and community in spaces marked by neglect or destruction.

We invite papers that examine the intricate relationships between urban inequality, infrastructure, and care. Key questions include:

• How do legacies of conflict and environmental damage reshape urban spaces and intensify social inequalities?
• How does maintaining basic necessities—water, shelter, safety—become a collective political practice in damaged landscapes?
• What emotional connections do communities form with their compromised environments, and how does trauma shape new forms of ecological identity?
• How can we understand "slow crises" that lack clear boundaries, and how do institutions and communities navigate permanent uncertainty?

This panel seeks to advance urban scholarship by examining how care functions as both survival strategy and political practice. We explore the tension between urban fragility and the emergence of resilient communities built on mutual support. Through comparative perspectives, we aim to understand how cities adapt to enduring risk, and how care becomes essential for addressing urban inequalities in an age of perpetual crisis.Cities across the globe are increasingly defined not by growth and prosperity, but by processes of decay and the accumulation of risk. From the ruins of war and industrial pollution to the slow-motion crises of environmental degradation, urban landscapes are bearing the scars of multiple, overlapping traumas. These "damaged landscapes" challenge conventional urban studies, which often focus on discrete catastrophic events and recovery. This panel proposes a shift in perspective: to investigate how communities learn to live within conditions of perpetual vulnerability, where the boundaries between normalcy and crisis are constantly blurred.

Our session engages with the core conference theme of "Inequalities and the City" by exploring how accumulated risks produce new forms of social vulnerability and, simultaneously, foster innovative practices of care. We are particularly interested in the concept of "reparative infrastructures"—the everyday, often-informal social and technical practices that sustain life in compromised environments. These practices are not just about fixing broken systems; they are about renegotiating citizenship, belonging, and justice in the face of ongoing neglect or destruction.

We invite paper presentations that critically examine the intersection of urban inequality, infrastructure, and care in such contexts. Key themes and questions we seek to explore include:

The Production of Urban Risk: How do the legacies of war, industrial pollution,

#62 Vacancy, occupation and commoning in global comparison

Session chair(s):

Cian O'Callaghan (Trinity College Dublin), Suraya Scheba, Judith Lehner, Kathleen Stokes

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

What happens when urban spaces lie vacant, are reclaimed through occupation, or become sites of commoning? How do these processes unfold differently across cities in the Global North and South, and what can we learn from their intersections?

Vacancy, occupation and commoning have all become popular and overlapping conceptual frames to describe radical experiments in urban space in recent decades. These are defined in spatial terms by marginality and precarity, but this also gives them transgressive and transformative power (Caffentiz and Federici, 2014). However, these relationships have been conceptualised differently across Northern and Southern urban theory. One set of literature has used the global financial crisis (GFC) as a conjunctural opening to understand political occupations as insurgent acts (Garcia-Lamarca, 2017). Conversely, research on Southern cities has treated the occupation of vacant land and commoning practices as a dominant form of urbanisation (e.g., Simone and Pieterse, 2018).

Thus, current scholarship is thematically and geographically divided. Complex geographical variegation and binary thinking have created barriers to global comparative and conceptual advancement. While recent literature has reframed vacancy as “active, lively, and contested” within urbanisation (O’Callaghan, 2024), this has not adequately attended to informality (Caldeira, 2017). Similarly, urban occupation movements in the global North have largely been portrayed as politically motivated, whilst occupations in the global South are framed as a ‘survival strategy’ (Cirolia et.al, 2021), thus failing to see their interconnections. This session’s core aim is to use the tension within these divergent debates to break the impasse of their incommensurability, working towards a global comparative theory of vacancy, occupation and commoning.

This session is interested in contributions that advance conceptual, empirical and methodological knowledge on how these three processes (re)make cities relationally, being both attentive to place while contributing to a global comparative urbanism agenda.
We invite papers that address the following topics that engage with vacancy, occupation, and commoning as ongoing urbanisation processes:

- South-North-East-West dialogues relating to vacancy, occupation and commoning
- Housing movements’ and urban initiatives’ struggles in sustaining commoning practices around vacancy
- Land and property occupations and their connection to urban historical processes
- Informal housing and autoconstruction across Northern and Southern geographies as forms of shaping (political) possibilities
- Methodologies allowing to approach vacancy, occupation and commoning comprehensively

References
Bhan, G. (2019). Notes on a Southern urban practice. Environment and Urbanization, 31(2), 639-654.
Caffentzis, G. & Federici, S. (2014). Commons against and beyond capitalism. Community Development Journal, 49(suppl_1), i92-i105.
Caldeira, T. P. (2017). Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), 3-20.
Cirolia, L. R., Ngwenya, N., Christianson, B. & Scheba, S. (2021). Retrofitting, Repurposing and re-Placing: A Multi-Media Exploration of Occupation in Cape Town, South Africa. PlaNext–Next Generation Planning, 11, 144–165.
García‐Lamarca, M. (2017). From occupying plazas to recuperating housing: Insurgent practices in Spain. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41(1), 37-53.
O’Callaghan, C. (2024). Rethinking vacancy within the urbanization process: towards a new research agenda. Urban Geography, 45(5), 863-882.

#63 Beyond North–South: Rethinking Urban Inequalities through the Geopolitics of Knowledge and Space

Session chair(s):

Do Young Oh (Seoul National University), Seungji Han

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Urban inequalities have long been analysed through frameworks rooted in Euro-American experiences, shaping dominant understandings of access to housing, infrastructure, services, and citizenship. Postcolonial urbanism has challenged this hegemony by provincialising “universal” theories and foregrounding diverse epistemologies and positionalities (Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2009; Watson, 2009; Lawhon and Truelove, 2019). Yet these debates often remain centred on the geopolitics of knowledge—who produces theory and where—while paying less attention to how inequalities are materially and spatially constituted through colonial, imperial, and neoliberal power geometries.
At the same time, urban theories developed in specific regional contexts—such as the developmental state paradigm in East Asia, dependency-informed analyses of Latin American urbanisation, or post-apartheid urbanism in South Africa—have frequently been treated as “territorially trapped” (Hwang, 2016), confined to explaining regional trajectories of inequality. While these theories have been invaluable, their dominance also risks narrowing the geography of knowledge production. This session, therefore, seeks not only to re-situate such regionally bounded theories within Global Urbanism (cf. Lancione and McFarlane, 2021) but also to foreground insights from contexts often overlooked in the conversation on “Southern Urbanism” (see also Shin, 2021). In doing so, we aim to expand the comparative imagination beyond the usual sites of reference and highlight how inequalities are theorised and contested in less canonical settings.
We invite contributions that interrogate North–South categories themselves as epistemic traps, while examining how urban inequalities are structured and reshaped in sites where spatial and temporal contradictions intersect—such as peri-urban fringes, redevelopment zones, informal settlements, or peripheralised urban landscapes. We understand these contradictions not as limitations, but as productive fractures: moments where dominant frameworks falter, and where alternative vocabularies, practices, and solidarities can emerge. By focusing on these fractures, this session seeks to advance comparative urbanism as both a critical and generative project.
Topics of interest include:
1. Knowledge and inequality: How epistemic hierarchies shape the study of urban inequality; positionality, translation, and collaborative research ethics.
2. Spatial inequalities and power-geometries: Analyses of how colonial, imperial, and neoliberal projects shape planning, informality, and infrastructure.
3. Re-situating regionally bounded theories: Using “territorially trapped” frameworks to rethink global patterns of inequality.
4. Methodological experimentation: Crossing postcolonial urbanism with Marxist, feminist, or critical race perspectives; new forms of writing and representation to capture multiple inequalities.

Themes:
South-North-East-West dialogues; Recent developments in theory; Built-environments

#64 Place Valuation and Various Forms of Urban Worth

Session chair(s):

Hesu Yoon (ENSAE Paris, CREST), Lavínia Pereira, Andrea Pavoni

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Cities have long been sites where social, economic, political, and environmental inequalities are produced, reproduced, and contested. Urban life is marked by stark inequalities in how places are valued—economically and symbolically. A crucial dimension of these dynamics is urban value—how worth is assigned, disputed, and distributed across space, time, and social life. Whether through real estate markets, platform-based ratings and reviews, neighborhood reputations, or planning decisions, the uneven valuation of place shapes contours of urban development and reproduces broader social hierarchies. Understanding these processes is central to shaping urban inequalities and experiences worldwide.

Urban value is not merely an economic figure but a complex negotiation encompassing moral ideals, cultural meanings, ecological metrics, and power relations. From real estate speculation and platform urbanism to grassroots activism and ecosystem services, diverse actors define and contest urban worth, determining who and what is valued—and who is marginalized. Places are framed as desirable or undesirable, safe or dangerous, authentic or inauthentic, investable or risky. These valuations are produced through intersecting logics—market dynamics, racialized and classed spatial biases, digital mediations—that have potential to reinforce or shift existing status hierarchies. Valuation processes underpin persistent inequalities through mechanisms such as gentrification, securitization, financialization, and technological expansions of extraction and surveillance.

Dominant institutional frameworks, such as livability indexes and economic indicators, organize urban life into simplified hierarchies frequently rendering invisible much everyday value produced by marginalized groups, with profound social and political consequences. This raises urgent epistemological and political questions: Who decides what constitutes valuable urban life? How are alternative or overlooked forms of value expressed, contested, or erased? Understanding uneven place valuation requires attention to the causes that generate spatial inequalities, the contours of how they manifest across contexts, and the consequences they produce for various stakeholders of urban futures.

This session aims to construct novel, strategic, and non-normative ways to conceptualize and produce quality of urban life that are alternatives to existing notions and critically assess its translation into economic and financial value. We invite contributions critically engaging with how valuation actively shapes urban inequalities and social relations across diverse global contexts.

We welcome contributions addressing:
- How urban worth is produced and contested through economic, social, cultural, ecological practices by various stakeholders, such as developers, state officials, business owners, cultural intermediaries, community activists and residents
- Speculative and emancipatory reimaginings of urban worth and (e)valuation systems beyond the existing measurements and imageries
- Intersections of place valuation with broader societal transformations including climate change, digital technologies, political polarization, rising inequalities, gentrification, and migration
- Methodological innovations to capture diverse forms of urban value and (e)valuation
- How racialized and classed biases, historical legacies of segregation and disinvestment structure place value in urban contexts
- Advancing theories of status, reputation, valuation by synthesizing literatures across disciplines
- How financial markets, policies, planning decisions produce uneven place valuations, and how they differently manifest across global cities

#65 Mobility Regimes between daily travel practices and Migration. Navigating Inequalities, Diversities, and Accessibility in Contemporary Urban Transformations

Session chair(s):

Maria Manuela Mendes (Babeș-Bolyai University, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work), Matteo Colleoni Luca, Simone Caiello Stefania Toma

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Contemporary inequalities in Europe and beyond are increasingly produced at the intersection of mobility, migration, and spatial organization. On the one hand, international, transnational, and internal mobilities reshape the social and spatial fabric of cities, metropolitan regions, and semi-urban/rural territories, bringing to the fore issues of diversity, categorical inequalities (class, gender, ethnicity, migrant status), and differentiated access to housing, services, and education. On the other hand, these mobility practices unfold within what has been conceptualized as mobility regimes (Kesselring, 2014) — configurations of infrastructures, policy frameworks, socio-technical arrangements, and governing narratives that determine who can move, how, where, and at what cost. Such regimes are never neutral: they are historically and politically situated and deeply implicated in the (re)production of social and spatial inequalities.

As a result, cities and metropolitan regions are become sites where inclusion and exclusion are both produced and contested.
The plurality of contemporary inequalities asks for a nuanced understanding of how mobility regimes shape both the movement of people and the (re)production of social inequalities in daily lives (from working conditions to reproductive activities and leisure) across European territories and beyond.

To understand how urban and spatial planning, mobility governance, and policy frameworks influence social stratification and everyday practices is essential to pay particular attention to conditions of social disadvantages, like transport poverty (Lucas et al., 2016) that encompasses economic, spatial, temporal, and infrastructural barriers that limit individual’s ability to reach essential opportunities such as work, education, housing, services, and social networks.
We welcome contributions grounded in direct experiences of migrants and mobile populations, as well as theoretical reflections, empirical research., and comparative perspectives that critically engage with experiences of mobile subjects, the way spatialized inequalities are produced and / contested, and how governance and policy responses mitigate or exacerbate multiple marginalities.

We invite papers that address the following questions (but are not limited to):
• How do migration and everyday mobility practices interact with existing mobility regimes to reconfigure social and spatial landscapes across urban, peri-urban, and rural/metropolitan contexts and what are the lived experiences of migrants navigating these regimes?
• How do policy and governance arrangements respond to (or fail to address) the right to the city, housing, and service access for diverse and mobile populations?
• In what ways do transport and accessibility infrastructures intersect with class, gender, ethnicity, and migrant status to reproduce or alleviate spatialized and multi-dimensional inequalities, within restrictive mobility regimes and transport poverty?
• How can empirically grounded studies inform forward-looking, justice-oriented interventions in mobility, spatial planning, and urban–regional development?
• What new methodological and comparative approaches can be used to capture the mobility-related accessibility, the interplay between physical/digital infrastructures, and lived experiences of inequality?

#66 The Politics and Practices of Infrastructuring: Participation, Mediation, and Variegations in State Engagement

Session chair(s):

Carl-Philipp Bodenstein (University of Vienna), Sudeshna Mitra, Karin Pfeffer, Federica Duca

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

"Key Themes: Urban Infrastructuring, Infrastructural Inequalities, Mediation, State Engagement, Participatory Approaches

Urban infrastructures are not merely technical systems; they are deeply embedded in the socio-spatial fabric of cities, shaping and reflecting inequalities across caste, class, race, and other axes of marginalization. The spatial distribution, accessibility, efficiency, and affordability of infrastructure are critical measures of how equitable and inclusive cities are—or can become. In recent years, the concept of ""infrastructuring"" has emerged to capture the dynamic, processual, and relational nature of infrastructure development. Infrastructuring encompasses the social practices, negotiations, and power dynamics that shape the design, distribution, maintenance, and transformation of infrastructure systems over time.
This panel explores the potential of urban infrastructuring to challenge socio-spatial inequalities while also interrogating how infrastructural systems and processes may reify or exacerbate these inequalities. It brings together two complementary perspectives: (1) the variegated ways in which state and non-state actors engage with the politics of infrastructuring, particularly in the context of the Global South, and (2) the role of participation, collaboration, and knowledge exchange in fostering more just and inclusive urban futures.
On one hand, infrastructuring is a site of contestation, where claims to infrastructure, recognition, and redistribution are negotiated between residents, mediators, and state institutions. These negotiations often reflect and reinforce existing hierarchies, as state responses to infrastructural claims vary across socio-economic groups. For instance, self-provisioning strategies like solar energy systems may be embraced in affluent areas but penalized in marginalized neighborhoods, highlighting the uneven governance of urban infrastructure. On the other hand, infrastructuring also offers opportunities for participatory and collaborative approaches to infrastructure co-production, enabling diverse actors to engage in iterative processes of knowledge exchange and decision-making. Digital tools such as GIS, collaboration platforms, and planning support systems can play a critical role in making these processes more inclusive and accessible.
By bringing together these perspectives, the panel aims to foster a critical dialogue on the transformative potential of urban infrastructuring and the challenges of addressing entrenched inequalities in cities around the world.

We invite papers that address the following questions:
• How do different urban actors—ranging from residents of informal settlements to middle-class and wealthy homeowners—engage with or resist state institutions in their claims to infrastructure?
• What roles do mediators, brokers, and facilitators play in shaping the relationship between state and non-state actors in the context of infrastructuring?
• How do state agencies selectively respond to infrastructural claims, and how do these responses reinforce or challenge existing hierarchies?
• How can participatory and collaborative geo-spatial approaches to infrastructuring address and alleviate socio-spatial inequalities?
• What are the long-term dynamics of infrastructuring processes, and how can they be studied and conceptualized?"

#67 Inclusive Cities. Reading inclusion challenges through the lens of urban space

Session chair(s):

Carolina Pacchi (DAStU Politecnico di Milano), Silvia Gullino

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Cities are dynamic and contested spaces where global challenges converge—social inequality, environmental degradation, economic disparities, and political tensions- all converge more acutely. Urban spaces are not the backdrop of these issues, rather a central arena where they are produced, experienced and potentially addressed.

This panel seeks multidisciplinary contributions that apply a spatial lens to understand how inclusion is made, unmade and remade. By focusing on spatiality, this session aims to illuminate how inclusiveness is not only a social or political framework, but also a lived experience profoundly shaped by urban form, infrastructure, governance, and everyday interactions.

We invite contributions that critically examine how cities can be sites of inclusiveness—where diverse populations coexist, access rights and opportunities equitably, and where innovative policies are tested to tackle intersecting social, environmental, economic, and political issues. We invite scholars, practitioners, and policymakers working across urban studies, geography, sociology, environmental science, planning, and related fields to engage with themes that foreground spatiality as both a lens and a means in addressing inclusiveness challenges.

Key Themes and Sub-themes:
- Spatial Dynamics of Social Inclusion and Exclusion: How do urban spatial arrangements, segregation, and accessibility shape belonging and marginalisation in cities? What roles do housing, transport, and public space play in reinforcing or disrupting social equity?
- Environmental Justice in Urban Contexts: How are climate risks, pollution, and green space unevenly distributed across urban areas? How can spatial tools support more just environmental policies?
- Economic Inclusion and Urban Spatial Economies: What are the spatial dimensions of economic opportunity and disadvantage? How do location, zoning, and redevelopment affect job access, informal economies, and resilience?
- Political Geography and Governance of Inclusive Cities: How do governance, participation, and spatial control influence inclusive urban futures? What role do policies, planning, and citizen engagement play in shaping equitable cities?

Research Questions:
• In what ways does a spatial lens reveal the complex intersectional nature of social, economic, environmental, and political challenges in urban contexts?
• How can urban policies and planning integrate principles of spatial justice to promote inclusiveness across diverse populations?
• What spatial methods (e.g., GIS, spatial ethnography, participatory mapping) best capture lived experiences of urban inclusion/exclusion?
• How are global challenges (e.g. climate change, migration, digital divides) spatially experienced in cities, and what innovative spatial interventions respond effectively?


Methods, Theories, and Approaches Invited:
We welcome empirical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary work on spatial inclusion in cities—ranging from GIS, ethnography, and participatory methods to critical theories like spatial justice. Case studies and policy analyses from global contexts are invited, particularly those examining how planning and governance can promote more inclusive urban futures. Empirical studies using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed spatial methods, including GIS-based analyses, spatial data visualisations, spatial ethnography, and participatory mapping.

This session aims to foster a robust dialogue among researchers and practitioners who view cities as critical spatial arenas where complex global challenges and inclusiveness intersect, offering pathways toward equitable and sustainable urban lives for all.

#68 Working the Urban: Labour, Precarity, and Infrastructures of Social Reproduction

Session chair(s):

Nicolás Palacios (ETH Zürich), Katrin Hofer, Sarah Schilliger

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Session theme
This session takes labour as a lens to examine the relation between work and urban life, focusing on how access, or lack of access, to infrastructures of social reproduction (Gillespie and Hardy, 2021), such as housing (Madden, 2025) mediates this relation. Drawing from an intersectional perspective, it explores how race, gender, class, and migration or citizenship status shape differentiated experiences of urban precarity. By centring the urban dimension, the session highlights how city-specific configurations of housing, care, and everyday infrastructures condition the possibilities of living and working in the city
Fostering an exchange between empirical cases and conceptual approaches from both the Global South and Global North, the session aims to generate nuanced insights into how urban inequalities manifest, evolve, and diverge across different global urban contexts.
Subthemes/keywords
Housing, labour, infrastructures, care, precarity, intersectionality, essential work, migration, urban inequality, platform labour.
Rationale
Labour and social reproduction are deeply entangled in urban life: access to housing, care, and everyday services fundamentally structures who can work and under what conditions, while the type and conditions of labour shape the capacity to reproduce life in the city (Fraser, 2016). This interdependence is especially visible in contexts marked by precarity, where access to infrastructures is fragmented or unequal, where aspects such as race deepen these inequalities (Salamanca and Silver, 2022).
We ask: what makes the interdependence between labour, infrastructures and social reproduction distinctly urban? How are they shaped by, and productive of, inequalities across different cities and regions?
Urban studies have long engaged with questions of precarity in informal settlements in the Global South. Yet, precarious infrastructures and practices of informality are increasingly salient in Global North contexts as well (Roy, 2005; Addie, 2022). By bringing these literatures and empirical contexts into dialogue, this session highlights both convergences and divergences in how labour and infrastructures of social reproduction intersect across geographies.
Key themes / possible contributions
-Housing and labour as interdependent infrastructures of precarity.
-Migration and border regimes as mediators of access to work, housing, and care.
-Informality and infrastructural gaps in both Global South and Global North cities.
-Care infrastructures and the gendered/racialized dimensions of social reproduction.
-Essential labour and the urban infrastructures that sustain it.
- Platform labour and the specific challenges it brings to the labour and housing nexus
Format
Regular panel with 4–5 paper presentations and open discussion. The session welcomes diverse empirical and conceptual contributions, particularly those that link Global South and Global North perspectives and those that reflect critically on conceptual and policy frameworks addressing urban precarity and social reproduction. Presenters may draw from varied methodologies and theoretical approaches, including urban studies, feminist theory, intersectionality, critical policy analysis, and ethnography.

#69 Housing and Beyond: Urban Inequalities, Welfare, and Infrastructures in the Global Urban Condition

Session chair(s):

Dhara Patel (Institute of Sociology, Technical University Darmstadt), Claudia Ba

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Urban inequalities persist in city-making, but they take on renewed intensity in contexts shaped by transnational migration, welfare retrenchment, and neoliberal governance. Housing, as both a commodity and a right, remains a central arena where inequalities are materialised: from exclusionary rental markets to the financialisation of urban property. Yet inequalities extend beyond housing, embedded in social infrastructures, welfare regimes, and urban imaginaries that structure access, belonging, and mobility.

This session invites contributions that interrogate the relational and transnational production of urban inequality. We ask:

• Migration, mobility, and imaginaries of home: How do North and South cities become interconnected through migration, investment, and knowledge flows, producing new hierarchies of class, race, gender, and status? How do different forms of mobility—South–South and North–South, cyclical or return migration, forced displacement and refuge—shape experiences of arrival, settlement, and belonging? In what ways do diasporic imaginaries of “home” and “homeland” materialise in urban environments and influence nation-state projects?
• Concepts of arrival and home: Which actors (state institutions, migrant organisations, civil society) mobilise notions of “arrival” and “home,” and to what ends? How do these concepts stabilise locally specific claims while also reproducing globally circulating categories of sameness and difference?
• The productivity of inequality: In what ways are inequalities not only reproduced but also productive, structuring urban aspirations, mobilities, and exclusions? How do welfare regimes, housing systems, and governance models across varied contexts manage—or actively generate—new urban inequalities?
• Beyond housing: infrastructures and welfare: How do infrastructures of arrival (healthcare, education, transport, civic institutions) and welfare regimes intersect with housing to shape belonging and exclusion? Do they mitigate inequalities, or reinforce them across North–South contexts?

We seek papers that mobilise critical and creative frameworks as well as methodological reflections to interrogate urban inequality as more than an outcome of uneven development: as a force that actively shapes urban futures. Approaches such as postcolonial urbanism (Roy 2011) unsettle universalist models of the city, foregrounding how Southern experiences reconfigure theory. Racial capitalism (Robinson 1983; Kelley 2017) highlights the entanglement of economic exploitation with racialised and other forms of difference, showing inequality is structurally generative, not incidental. Neoliberalism as exception (Ong 2006) draws attention to how states selectively suspend or reinvent rules to produce new zones of inclusion and exclusion. Concepts such as the Capability Approach (Sen, 2001) critically address the tropes of ‘the good life’, well-being, and Urban Quality of Life (uQoL), informing understandings of urban housing markets and global individual possibilities. Together, these perspectives invite us to rethink inequality not as residual or pathological, but as a constitutive logic of contemporary urbanism—a logic that links North and South, South and South, past and present, revealing persistent (neo)coloniality embedded in governance, infrastructures, and everyday urban life.

By foregrounding housing, infrastructures of arrival, migration trajectories and transnational movements as key sites of inquiry, this panel invites comparative, transdisciplinary, historical, and ethnographic contributions that examine how old inequalities persist while new ones are forged, producing cities as contested terrains of exclusion and justice.

#70 Pluralizing urban property between the state and everyday life: production, knowledges, practices, and imaginaries

Session chair(s):

Naama Blatman (University of New South Wales), Alexander Vasudevan (University of Oxford), Ifigeneia Dimitrakou, Daan Bossuyt (Universiteit Utrecht), Elya Milner (Technische Universität Berlin), João Tonucci (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), David Madden (London School of Economics and Political Science), Samuel Burgrum (University of Sheffield)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

We are in a moment of profound reckoning with the power of property. While property is central to urban life, it often hides in plain sight. Property is not just a legal category but also a structuring relation, underpinning and mediating the social relations and everyday interactions that shape and form extended modes of urbanization. At the same time, property operates as a powerful institution that determines who benefits from land and housing (Safransky 2023), and who belongs where, and whose claims to space count (Roy, 2017). Property is a dynamic order of violence and dispossession rooted in longstanding histories of racialisation and settler colonialism (Mbembe 2023; Blatman-Thomas & Porter 2019; Bhandar 2018).

This panel brings into conversation two perspectives that recentre the role of property in an age of ever-expanding urbanisation. We examine how states govern through property via new circuits of value, assetisation, and financialisation and how these processes are lived, negotiated and contested in the realm of everyday urban life. Moving beyond the narrow legalistic “ownership model” of private property (Singer, 2000) we ask: how do “deep infrastructural entanglements” (Christophers 2022, 148) between states and financial capital reshape property regimes? How do state-led processes that intervene in and reorganise property relations intersect with everyday practices of property-making and contestation? What role do competing forms of property knowledge (i.e., from cadastral systems to counter-mappings) play in reinforcing or resisting property regimes? What new imaginaries emerge that subvert existing property regimes and prefigure alternatives in cities?

We invite papers that address the following questions/topics:
- Property knowledges and counter-knowledges
- State power and the re/making of urban property regimes
- Everyday property practices and contestations
- New imaginaries and futures ‘beyond property’.
Taken together these topics seek to foreground plural understandings of property explored at once ‘from the top’ (state) and ‘the bottom.’ We welcome papers addressing any of the above questions as we hope to bring into dialogue a range of geographies and critical approaches (including ethnographic, conceptual/theoretical, methodological, and creative/visual).

References
Bhandar, B. (2018). Colonial lives of property: Law, land, and racial regimes of ownership. Duke University Press.
Blatman‐Thomas, N., & Porter, L. (2019). Placing property: Theorizing the urban from settler colonial cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(1), 30-45.
Christophers, B. (2022). The role of the State in the transfer of value from Main Street to Wall Street: US single‐family housing after the financial crisis. Antipode, 54(1), 130-152.
Mbembe, A. (2023) Brutalisme. La Découverte
Roy, A. (2017). Dis/possessive collectivism: Property and personhood at city’s end. Geoforum, 80, A1-A11.
Safransky, S. (2023). The city after property: Abandonment and repair in postindustrial Detroit. Duke University Press.
Singer, J. (2000). Entitlement: the paradoxes of property. Yale University Press.

#71 Informal Rental Housing: Bridging North-South Divides

Session chair(s):

Julia Harten (University of British Columbia), Andreas Scheba, Anam Bashir, Saila-Maria Saaristo Abraham Rajab Matamanda

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Informal rental housing has emerged as a significant feature of contemporary urbanism across diverse geographical contexts, challenging conventional assumptions that informality is primarily a Global South phenomenon. From basement suites in Vancouver and London's "sheds with beds" to backyard shacks in Cape Town and overcrowded apartments in Mumbai, informal rental arrangements shape how millions of urban residents access housing amidst intensifying affordability crises. These arrangements exist in regulatory grey zones where legality is ambiguous, enforcement is selective, state complicity is common, and tenants navigate precarious conditions while markets and governments co-produce informality. The global proliferation of informal rental housing—spanning the entire income spectrum from survival housing for marginalized populations to middle-class homeowners supplementing precarious mortgages—demands comparative analysis that bridges persistent North-South divides in urban scholarship. While informal rental practices share common features across contexts—including their emergence as pragmatic responses to housing crises, their role in reproducing inequalities, and their ambiguous relationship with state regulation—they also reflect distinct political-economic configurations, histories, welfare regimes, and planning systems. Understanding these commonalities and differences requires moving beyond simplistic binaries to examine how informal rental housing operates simultaneously as survival strategy, accumulation mechanism, and governance challenge across diverse urban settings.

The aim of this session is to promote comparative dialogue on informal rental housing to advance scholarship that learns from and with theories across geographical contexts. We seek empirically grounded contributions that interrogate how informal rental markets emerge, function, and transform urban inequalities along intersecting axes of class, race, gender, migration status, and geography.

We invite papers that address the following questions:
How do informal rental arrangements expose the limits and contradictions of formal housing systems in both North and South?
What are the political-economic drivers underlying the growth, transformation, typologies and conditions of informal rental housing in different contexts?
How do states, markets, and communities differentially produce and govern informal rental housing across contexts?
What factors affect the price, quality and living conditions of informal rental housing within and across urban contexts?
How do inequalities of race, class, gender, and citizenship shape who relies on informal rental housing and on what terms?
What methodological innovations can reveal the hidden and intersecting dynamics (e.g. race, class, gender, migration) of informal rental markets?
And how might comparative perspectives on informal rental housing contribute to broader theoretical debates on urban informality, housing justice, and the right to the city?

Selected References:
Baqai, A. N., & Ward, P. M. (2020). Renting and Sharing in Low-Income Informal Settlements: Lacunae in Research and Policy Challenges. Current Urban Studies, 8(3), 456–483. https://doi.org/10.4236/cus.2020.83026
Devlin, R. T. (2018). Asking ‘Third World questions’ of First World informality: Using Southern theory to parse needs from desires in an analysis of informal urbanism of the global North. Planning Theory, 17(4), 568–587. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095217737347
Scheba, A., & Turok, I. (2020). Informal rental housing in the South: Dynamic but neglected. Environment & Urbanization, 32(1), 109–132. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247819895958

#72 Urban Health and Publicness: Rethinking Inequalities, Governance and Citizenship in Contemporary Cities

Session chair(s):

Emanuele Polizzi (Università di Milano Bicocca), Sara Vallerani, Carlotta Mozzana

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

As urban populations expand, health has become a central arena in which urban inequalities are produced, contested and redefined. This session explores urban health as both an analytical lens and a field of political and social action where cities, institutions, and collective actors negotiate the meanings and practices of care, well-being and citizenship.

Urban health systems are complex socio-political configurations shaped by multi-level governance and by interactions among public, private and civil society actors. From municipal health departments and environmental planning offices to community clinics, social movements and private providers, these actors contribute to (re)defining what counts as “public” in health. Drawing on sociological approaches to public action (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2018; Moini, 2013) and urban citizenship (Isin, 2007; Sassen, 1996), the session invites contributions that analyze how health becomes an object of public concern, intervention and conflict within cities, and how diverse actors shape urban health governance and its inequalities.

The session builds on the idea that the city has a dual nature: it is simultaneously a producer of inequalities and a generator of salutogenic potential. On the one hand, urban environments concentrate structural disparities—unequal access to care, pollution, precarious housing and socio-spatial segregation—making visible how health inequities are rooted in urban forms and political economies. On the other hand, cities are also spaces of possibility, where proximity, density and social heterogeneity enable new alliances, collective actions and innovative practices of care. By being traversed, inhabited and enacted by heterogeneous social actors, cities can become fertile terrains for experimenting with alternative models of welfare, solidarity and participation. This ambivalence calls for analytical frameworks capable of grasping how health inequalities are both produced and contested through urban processes.

We particularly welcome contributions that:

examine how inequalities in access to care, environmental health and social determinants are spatially organized and politically contested in urban contexts;
explore how collective social actors (municipalities, NGOs, associations, social movements or professional groups) construct forms of urban health citizenship;
analyze the role of private healthcare actors and market-oriented logics in shaping urban health systems, reconfiguring notions of public responsibility and access;
investigate how governance arrangements - across scales and sectors - shape the publicness of health and the interaction between public and private forms of provision;
propose comparative and methodological reflections on researching health in and of the city.

By bringing together case studies from diverse geographical contexts, this session seeks to foster interdisciplinary and comparative dialogue on how cities operate as laboratories of health governance and as arenas of democratic experimentation. It aims to advance conceptual discussions on urban health as public action, linking sociological perspectives on inequality, governance and citizenship to the challenges of sustainable, inclusive and healthy urban futures.

#73 Land-use conflicts in the making of the city

Session chair(s):

Julie Pollard (University of Lausanne), Lauriane Cailleux, Sabrina Neyret

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

In recent years, land-use conflicts have attracted growing scholarly attention as crucial entry points for understanding the contemporary production of urban space. Such conflicts illuminate both the material shaping of cities and the social and political processes that structure territorial dynamics. Emerging around urban development projects, the siting of public facilities, or environmental transformations, they crystallize tensions between competing visions for neighborhoods and cities, and highlight unequal access to urban resources. Political decisions regarding the location of infrastructures and amenities can have important social consequences for surrounding areas. These choices may fuel gentrification and the displacement of low-income groups or, conversely, contribute to the stigmatization and further impoverishment of specific neighborhoods. They also shape the way everyday life unfolds in the neighborhood or the city, whether in terms of mobility, social life or environmental quality.

These conflicts are now unfolding against the backdrop of new urban policy agendas, such as zero net land take, densification, retrofitting, and climate adaptation. While these agendas seek to address pressing environmental challenges, they can also generate new lines of contestation by reshaping spatial priorities and redistributing urban costs and benefits. In many cases, their social, financial, and spatial impacts are borne disproportionately by disadvantaged groups, thereby exacerbating existing urban inequalities and sparking renewed struggles over land use.

Building on these considerations, this panel invites contributions that engage with, while are not restricted to, the following areas:

(1) Actors and social representation. First, we seek to examine who mobilizes in land-use conflicts and how these mobilizations reproduce or disrupt existing social inequalities. Which groups have the resources, time, or institutional access to participate effectively in these conflicts? Do land-use controversies reinforce the dominance of already privileged groups? How do different social interests (along lines of class, gender, race or citizenship) engage with these conflicts?

(2) Narratives and framings. Second, land-use conflicts provide a fertile ground to investigate how inequalities are thematized, represented, and contested in public debates. What kinds of narratives emerge in these conflicts, and how do they frame issues of for instance environmental justice, social inequalities, or gendered experiences of space? In some cases, conflicts can bring latent inequalities to the surface, turning them into explicit objects of contestation. In others, they may sideline certain inequalities, privileging technocratic or depoliticized framings.

(3) Outcomes. Third, we aim to interrogate the outcomes of land-use conflicts in terms of urban inequalities. Do these conflicts sometimes lead to more equitable urban outcomes, by redistributing resources or giving voice to marginalized groups? Or do they exacerbate existing inequalities, for instance by accelerating gentrification, reinforcing exclusionary practices, or entrenching socio-spatial divisions?

We invite contributions from a wide range of theoretical, disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives to explore these questions – including but not limited to urban studies, political ecology and critical policy studies. By bringing together diverse empirical contexts, methodological and conceptual frameworks, this panel aims to foster dialogue across disciplines and case studies across the globe. Ultimately, we seek to interrogate how land-use conflicts reveal and/or produce urban inequalities.

#74 Practising What We Preach”: Collective Urban Praxis, Relational and Transformative Approaches to Challenging Urban Inequalities

Session chair(s):

Christian Olmos Herrera (Collective Viena Chilena (AT)), Hugo López, Juliana Gonçalves, Marcela Torres Heredia

Format type:

Innovative Session: Method Stations

Description:

This session examines how academic engagement can catalyse collective urban action that directly challenges persistent inequalities. We explore methodological and pedagogical innovations through an interactive format that embodies the very principles we advocate.
Urban inequalities persist partly because traditional research approaches reproduce extractive relationships between researchers and communities. While participatory methods have gained prominence, many have become institutionalised and procedural, losing their radical potential for structural change. This session seeks to recover engagement practices that operate as prefigurative politics.
Rather than traditional presentations about participatory methods, this Interactive Method Lab demonstrates transformative approaches through direct experience, featuring the innovative Mapas Parlantes methodology as a central component, complemented by other approaches. The session operates as a collective rehearsal where participants engage with proven methodologies, breaking down hierarchies between presenter and audience.

Mapas Parlantes Workshop (25 min): A short presentation of the project, followed by participants' experience with this participatory mapping methodology, which combines cartographic representation with oral storytelling to document community knowledge and urban inequalities. Using the platform's digital tools and narrative techniques, attendees create speaking maps of their own urban contexts, demonstrating how communities can become co-producers of spatial knowledge rather than research subjects.

Embodied Mapping Extension (20 min): Building on Mapas Parlantes principles, participants use tactile materials and movement to explore how bodies experience urban inequalities, extending digital mapping into physical space.
Storytelling Circle (20 min): Rotating micro-narratives inspired by Mapas Parlantes' oral tradition, where participants share 3-minute stories of urban transformation, building collective knowledge through voice and memory.
Visual Documentation Lab (15 min): Real-time creation of visual representations combining insights from speaking maps with drawing, collage, and digital tools.
Collective Action Planning (10 min): Using mapping insights to design concrete actions for challenging inequalities in participants' own contexts.

We invite researchers, educators, and practitioners to join our innovative session. This immersive 90-minute workshop explores how participatory methodologies—such as the Mapas Parlantes project—can transform academic practice into collective urban action, challenging inequalities through collaborative mapping, storytelling, and embodied learning. Participants are encouraged to bring their own local and practical experiences to the workshop so we can learn from them and put them in conversation with the Mapas Parlantes project.

Questions Explored:
1. How can collaborative cartographies like Mapas Parlantes challenge rather than merely document urban inequalities?
2. What forms of co-making emerge when communities control their own spatial narratives?
3. How do speaking maps demonstrate the transformative potential of combining digital tools with oral traditions?
4. What does it mean to ""learn solidarity and justice"" through participatory mapping?

Participant Engagement: Attendees rotate through stations, experiencing the Mapas Parlantes methodology alongside complementary approaches. The session generates collective outputs—speaking maps, embodied documentation, action plans—that become shared resources for continued engagement. Participants leave with practical experience of a proven methodology for community-controlled spatial research.
Innovation Rationale: This format aligns methodology with message by centring Mapas Parlantes as an exemplar of how digital and artistic tools amplify rather than extract community knowledge. By experiencing this methodology firsthand, participants explore how academic conferences can serve as sites of prefigurative politics, showcasing concrete alternatives to traditional research hierarchies.

The session contributes to emerging transdisciplinary discourse on engaged urban praxis while showcasing successful innovations in participatory mapping that directly confront urban inequalities through community-controlled storytelling and spatial representation.

Resources: 3-4 A0 maps produced by the Mapas Parlantes project, movable furniture, wall space for visual work, basic art supplies, and audio equipment for storytelling circle.

#75 Southern Indigenous Urban Praxis: Rethinking planning, urban theory, and the politics of inequality

Session chair(s):

Andres F. Ramirez (University of California Los Angeles), Philipp Horn

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Scholarship on urban indigeneity highlights the entanglement of colonization and urbanization. Foundational work by Evelyn Peters (2002) and others documents the marginalization of Indigenous people in cities, particularly around housing, welfare, and urban reserves. This literature demonstrates thatcities function as contradictory spaces: sites of Indigenous dispossession, yet also of presence, resistance, and cultural survival. Key debates have centered around land, whiteness, and property, with scholars like Glen Coulthard (2014) conceptualizing “urbs nullius” to link settler-colonial ideologies with urban gentrification. Research also explores Indigenous planning practices (Jojola, 2008; Porter et al 2017), emphasizing community agency, negotiation with state authorities, and alternative frameworks outside Western paradigms. More recently, the notion of “Indigenous urbanisms” has framed cities as relational, plural, and contested spaces shaped by Indigenous inhabitation (Blatman and Mays, 2023). This approach challenges the dominance of Western knowledge in urban studies and positions planning itself as a colonial practice. Yet, Southern perspectives remain overlooked and understudied within these debates, which predominantly emerge from settler colonial settings like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.

Addressing this gap, the panel invites contributions that examine how Indigenous urban communities unsettle established planning norms and expose enduring inequalities in Southern urban settings. Submissions may focus on diverse urban contexts—from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa,to South Asia—to explore how Indigenous epistemologies and collectivities challenge the dominance of linear, property-based, and regulatory models of space and time. We particularly encourage contributions to focus on one or multiple of the following themes:

1. Urban epistemic differences, where Southern urban Indigenous perspectives privilege fluid, relational, and multi-scalar spatialities.
2. Alternative Southern urban Indigenous territorial configurations, where practices of re-territorialization, multi-territoriality, and autonomous governance sustain insurgent logics despite long histories of dispossession.
3. The ethical and conceptual limits of “Indigenous planning” and “Indigenous urbanism” emerging from settler colonial contexts in the global North and their relevance for Southern urban settings.
4. The degree to which Southern Indigenous urban practices constitute planning, something adjacent to planning, or an altogether different ordering of urban life.

In bringing together grounded case studies with collaborative, dialogical modes of analysis, this panel foregrounds Southern Indigenous urban territorialities as both enduring and emergent. It asks how they make visible the layered inequalities inscribed in urban space, while gesturing toward futures that reimagine mobility, commons, and collective belonging. In doing so, the panel positions Southern Indigenous urban life not as marginal or residual, but as generative sites for rethinking planning, urban theory, and the politics of inequality.

Blatman, N. and Mays, K., 2023. Indigenous urbanisms. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 47(1), pp.106-109.

Coulthard, G.S., 2014. Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: Minnesota.

Jojola, T., 2008. Indigenous planning—An emerging context. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 17(1), pp.37-47.

Peters, E.J., 2002. Our city Indians: Negotiating the meaning of First Nations urbanization in Canada, 1945-1975. Historical Geography, 30(2002), pp.75-92.

Porter, L., et al 2017. Indigenous planning. Planning Theory & Practice, 18(4), pp.639-666.

#76 A Cultural-Cognitive Approach To “Inequalities and the City”

Session chair(s):

Lorenzo Sabetta (Sapienza-University of Rome), Sara Lancieri

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

How are urban inequalities perceived, and under what conditions are they ignored? What role does spatial knowledge play in reproducing or contesting environmental disparities? In what ways do the social mindscapes of contemporary cities intersect with residential segregation, metropolitan marginalization, and exclusion?

In her influential 2010 Poetics paper, Daina Cheyenne Harvey emphasized the dynamic relationship between space and cognition: cognitive modes shape our understanding of space just as the spatial configuration of social environments shapes our cognitive modes. In a brief article published in 2003, David Harvey similarly suggested the introduction of a “right to the city,” arguing how molding the cities we inhabit “more in accord with our heart’s desire” (p. 941) would directly affect our comprehension of urban realities and of ourselves, as well as the possibility of altering them. Yet, this dialectical interdependence is still understudied – more than a century after Simmel’s seminal essay The Metropolis and Mental Life. While the idea that we think not only as individuals but also as members of particular “thought communities” is widely accepted, it has rarely been applied systematically. Other than some notable exceptions (see inter alia Brekhus 2003; Portugali 2011; Scott 2014; Janz 2017; Middleton 2021; Brighenti 2022; Simone 2022), the complex, intersubjective meanings produced within the context of today’s cities are often overlooked in discussions of inequality.

The main purpose of this panel is to explore (and update) the substantive connection between the sociology of the mind and the sociology of the city through the prism of inequalities. We invite contributions – both theoretical and empirical, quantitative and qualitative, micro and macro – that approach the city either as an independent variable (i.e., how urban configurations of inequality affect cognitive modes) or as a dependent variable (i.e., how cognitive modes shape urban experiences of inequality).

We especially encourage cross-disciplinary, theory-driven, and empirically grounded work that addresses the following central questions:
• How do socio-mental conventions by which we attend and disattend to features of urban space contribute to the persistence of urban inequalities?
• Conversely, how might these same cultural-cognitive frameworks stem or mitigate such inequalities?
• What circumstances can favor or hinder such processes (and the occurrence of mega-events, the degree of gentrification of urban areas, etc.)?

Relevant sub-themes may include (but are not limited to):

● Differences in the socio-cognitive “politics of perception” existing in cities of the Global South versus the Global North.
● The nexus between the attention economy, technological developments, contemporary cities, and the reproduction of inequalities.
● Patterns in selecting certain inequalities as extraordinary and remarkable over other forms of inequalities neglected as commonplace and ordinary.
● The social phenomenology of events and infrastructure in urban life, as well as the overlap of mental and material infrastructures in today’s city.
● The (shift in) perception of one’s city following the implementation of policies aimed at urban regeneration and at the redevelopment of specific neighborhoods.
● The impact of cultural-cognitive “nodes” and features (e.g., feelings/emotions, schemas/frames, visibility, curiosity, etc.) on the interaction with/participation in urban.

#77 Care Inequalities and the Spaces of Solidarity: Feminist and Queer Geographies of Caring Cities

Session chair(s):

Bahar Sakızlıoğlu (Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University), Ceren Lordoğlu (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Feminist urban scholars have long shown that care is central to how cities function and how urban inequalities are lived (Katz 2001; Williams 2017). Despite growing feminist work on care-full justice (Williams 2020), cities of care (Power and Williams 2019), and social reproduction (Peake et al. 2021), care still remains marginal in urban theory, policy and space. The unequal distribution of care work, largely carried by women, migrants, queer communities and racialized groups, shapes who can access housing, public space, and participation in urban life (Federici 2018; Morrow and Parker 2020).

These care inequalities reflect a deeper absence of a feminist ethics of care in urban policy and governance. In times of multiple crises—ecological, social, and political- a feminist ethics of care may seem as a radical proposition. Nonetheless, feminist thought has long developed the intellectual and political tools required to reimagine care as a social, relational process that supports life rather than simply compensates for systematic neglect. Bringing feminist care ethics into urban politics provides a change away from abstract concepts of justice and toward "care-full" versions of justice that emphasize everyday labor of sustaining shared environments. Such an orientation encourages us to imagine future urbanities in which feminist solidarity is not only an ethical stance, but also an infrastructural practice embedded in community kitchens, cooperative housing, mutual aid networks, and other forms of collective care labor that challenge neoliberal urban rationalities. Centering such ethics means confronting epistemic injustices that make care invisible and undervalued (Williams 2020), and reimagining housing, public space, and the city itself as infrastructures of care (Mee and Power 2021).

This session explores how care inequalities are produced and spatialized and how feminist, queer, and migrant solidarities contest them through everyday practices such as mutual aid networks, childcare and housing cooperatives, and community infrastructures. These practices reshape the spatialities and temporalities of care, creating new forms of connection, belonging, and resistance to urban inequality (Federici 2018).

By linking feminist, queer, and critical urban research, this session asks: What would it mean to build caring cities? How can feminist ethics of care offer epistemic and spatial alternatives to urban inequality and neoliberal urbanization?

We invite empirical and conceptual contributions that examine:

-How care inequalities are produced and distributed across housing, public space, and urban infrastructure
-Solidarity practices that redistribute and politicize care
-Who benefits from solidarities of care, and who remains excluded
-Queer, feminist, migrant solidarities that enact caring cities in everyday life
-Temporalities of care and their role regarding the reconfiguration of belonging and citizenship
-How a feminist ethics of care can guide urban theory, policy, and everyday practices toward more just and caring cities

#78 Re-conceptualizing displacement through intersecting migration and urban theory

Session chair(s):

Romola Sanyal (LSE), René Kreichauf

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

How do we conceptualize the urban and urban citizenship in an age of global displacements? This question is both complex and urgent as we see displacement has become a key organizing logic of rural and urban life from across the world where “different” forms of displacement are closely intertwined. In this session, we want to bring different parts of the world—Global Southeast, and Global Northwest—together to investigate this question both in its local specificities and its global impacts. Specifically, we want to discuss what knowledge can emerge from bringing evictions, homelessness, disaster induced displacement with rural-urban migration, land dispossessions and displacements due to civil conflict into conversation with each other. Our session aims to decolonize and bridge divides in both urban and migration studies that have long remained separate avenues of inquiry. We welcome contributions that that study the ways in displacements overlap, spill into each other and move across the world. Papers can be both empirical and theoretical, however, we highly welcome contributions that attempt to re-conceptualize Western-dominated understandings of displacement.

#79 Whiteness, Race, and Urban Transformation: Reproducing Privilege Across Diverse Urban Contexts

Session chair(s):

Carolina Sternberg (DePaul University), Tilman Schwarze, Christine Barwick-Gross

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This panel critically examines how whiteness operates as a socio-spatial and political force in shaping urban life and redevelopment across diverse global contexts. While contemporary cities are often celebrated for their ethnic and cultural diversity, the racialized global order continues to influence everyday practices, institutional arrangements, and urban discourses. Processes such as gentrification, social mixing policies, and state-led renewal are frequently framed as neutral or progressive, yet they often reproduce racial hierarchies and privilege whiteness, both materially and symbolically.
Drawing on race-critical and decolonial perspectives, this session foregrounds whiteness not as a bodily trait but as an orientation that structures access to space, resources, and belonging (Ahmed, 2007). We explore how this norm operates in cities of the Global North and South, from post-industrial urban centers to postcolonial and settler-colonial contexts. In North America and Western Europe, redevelopment projects have displaced racialized communities under the guise of "revitalization," privileging white cultural aesthetics and middle-class norms (Sternberg, 2023; Schwarze, 2023; Wilson, 2018). In Latin America, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, whiteness often manifests through global capital flows, elite planning paradigms, and the marginalization of Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations (Figueiredo et al. 2020; Walker et al. 2020; Manzi et al. 2018).
We invite papers (theoretical, conceptual, and empirical) that address the following questions:
• How does whiteness manifest in everyday encounters, institutional practices, and urban redevelopment strategies?
• In what ways do planning and policy reinforce racial hierarchies and white privilege?
• What historical continuities link colonial urbanism to contemporary redevelopment?
• How do racialized communities resist or reimagine urban space in emancipatory ways?
• What methods allow us to study whiteness beyond visual markers, as a set of norms and values?
By fostering a transnational and interdisciplinary dialogue, this panel seeks to advance critical urban scholarship on race, whiteness, and socio-spatial inequality, while highlighting strategies for challenging these dynamics in diverse urban settings.
References:
Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–168.
Figueiredo, G. C. D. S., dos Santos, M., & Silva, R. (2020). The Black city: Modernisation and fugitivities in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Radical Housing Journal, 2(2), 55–82.
Manzi, T., Lucas, K., & Jones, P. (2018). Neighbourhood planning and the right to the city: Confronting neoliberal state urban practices in Salvador, Brazil. International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development, 10(1), 1–15.
Schwarze, T. (2023). Space, urban politics, and everyday life: Henri Lefebvre and the U.S. city. Springer.
Sternberg, C. (2023). Neoliberal urban governance: Spaces, culture and discourses in Buenos Aires and Chicago. Palgrave Macmillan.
Walker, J., dos Santos, M., & Silva, R. (2020). Urban claims and the right to the city: Grassroots perspectives from Salvador da Bahia and London. University College London Press.
Wilson, D. (2018). Chicago’s new racial redevelopment machine and South Side blues clubs. Palgrave Macmillan.

#80 Entangled Relations of Peripheralization in African Urban Spaces: Rethinking Theories, Methods and Ways of Knowing (2)

Session chair(s):

Lindsay Sawyer (Technical University Munich), Lindsay Blair Howe

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This double panel invites contributions that critically examine the entangledrelationships that shape urban life in African cities, particularly Nigeria and South Africa and in planetary comparative context. For instance, how do informality, the state, and customary authority intersect in the production of space? In contexts such as Lagos and Johannesburg, negotiations around land, property, and ownership remain central to how urban space is claimed, governed, and lived. These practices are bound up with deeper questions of power and sovereignty —questions that unfold through processes of de-/ re-/ territorialization and peripheralization. By foregrounding entanglements, this panel is less concerned with defining what is or isn’t informal for instance, but invites creative and bold reflections on what spaces and affects these relationships produce, and what this tells us about the urbanization of African contexts and the possibilities for urban transformation, particularly in regard to peripheralization.

We especially welcome papers that engage with the intersections of design, gender, ecology, and the more-than-human in urban transformations. Urban peripheries often make visible the uneven distribution of resources, the tensions between state and customary authority, and the ways in which extended urbanization reorganizes both human livelihoods and non-human ecologies. Paying close attention to these lived entanglements can help us trace how inequality occurs but also how new practices of organization and solidarity emerge.

Methodology is a core concern of this panel. How can ethnographic, comparative, anti-, de-, non-colonial and mixed-methods research do justice to the complexities of all these entanglements? What different ways of knowing can illuminate and challenge our understandings? What approaches make it possible to move between the scales of the planetary? By focusing on methodological innovation, we aim to open space for dialogue about how to theorize urbanization with and from African urban spaces, and how such knowledge-making might contribute to rethinking urban research, methods, policy and design.

We invite papers that push far beyond Eurocentric paradigms in urban studies (or don’t reference them at all), contributing to critical conversations in anti-, de-, non-colonial and comparative urbanism, extended urbanization, and the dialectics of centre and periphery. In doing so, this panel aligns with the mission of the newly created Centre for Urbanisation and Peripheralization (CUSP) to build theory and practice that bridges North–South divides while advancing more socially just and ecologically attuned urban futures.

We welcome paper that address the following themes and questions in regards to urbanisation in African urban spaces, particularly Nigeria and South Africa. Broader comparative perspectives are particularly welcome:
• What are the relationships between informality – the state – customary authorities?
• How do these relationships intersect with land – property – ownership?
• What do these relationships tell us about power – sovereignty – territorialization and peripheralisation-nature-urbanization?
• What can be learned within and between different urban contexts in comparative perspective?
• What methodologies enable this learning?
• How might such learning enable future or support existing urban transformations?
• Paying particular attention to design, gender, the more-than-human, anticolonialism

#81 Epistemic friendships in/across difference: Rethinking methodologies in urban research

Session chair(s):

Saanchi Saxena (Politecnico di Torino, Italy), Aseela Haque

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Urban research has long grappled with the challenge of conducting inquiry across boundaries, borders, and difference. State borders, linguistic divides, socio-spatial inequalities shape how knowledge is produced, what objects of inquiry come into being, as well as whose voices are centred in scholarship. Critical anthropological scholarship has emphasised how difference is not merely encountered in the field but actively constitutes the very conditions of ethnographic knowledge-production (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). In this context, the notion of epistemic friendship centered on feminist modes of reciprocity, shared responsibility, and relational care as a foundational principle for the production of knowledge (Lugones and Rosezelle 1995) offers a generative way to rethink research methodologies, particularly when tensions in geopolitics, institutional design, and power asymmetries limit conventional modes of collaborations.

Although seldom examined in depth, the role of friendship in research has been increasingly acknowledged by scholars as dismantling hierarchical dynamics in fieldwork (Tillmann-Healy 2003), fostering multivocality and care in the production of knowledge (Owton and Allen-Collinson 2014), and revealing how friendship with interlocutors allows “their interests [to] come to matter to us,” making friendship not a threat to objectivity but constitutive of the research process itself (Ramírez-i-Ollé 2019, 309). Friendship comes to have a heightened value as conventional methods become improbable in particularly difficult contexts of war and periods of crisis (de Regt 2015).

What kind of collaborations does epistemic friendship make possible? This panel invites researchers to examine the methodological, conceptual, and political potential of epistemic friendship in and across difference. We call for interventions that critically engage with how friendship reorient research practices when relations are mediated by uneven relations of power, borders, or disciplinary divides in urban research.

Key questions:

We’re open to different interpretations of “epistemic friendship” collaborations, but we invite presenters to engage with these key questions, or even go beyond:
1. How can friendships, between researchers, with interlocutors, or encompassing more-than-human relations cut across differences to create new ethnographic objects and comparative insights in the urban?
2. How might epistemic friendship itself become a method of navigating disruptions produced by conflict, climate change, geopolitics, authoritarian governance, securitisation of academic mobility, academic precarity, visa regimes, and so on?
3. How does paying attention to epistemic friendship contribute towards critical approaches of doing comparative urbanism, participatory, and more-than-human research?
3. How can epistemic friendships trouble the ‘extractivist’ model of research in the urban context? What are the implications for anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and spatially just interventions and solidarity?
4. While friendship between researchers/interlocutors/research contexts can lead to new and liberatory forms of knowledge, what are some things that are left out, decentred, or constitutive of exclusionary modes of (dis)engagement (e.g. gate keeping, nepotism) that reinscribe unequal relations in cities?

Particular attention will be paid to works grounded in feminist, decolonial, queer, anti-caste, Southern approaches in doing collaborative research on the urban. We highly encourage submissions from joint/co-authored proposals, especially from those writing from precarious academic contexts, and we would like to create space for multiple participants to present their research together.

#82 Challenging inequalities through a renewed territorial approach for urban research and action

Session chair(s):

Christian Schmid (ETH Zürich, Department of Architecture, Switzerland), Camilla Perrone

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

The concept of territory is at once indispensable and contested across different disciplines in urban research, such as sociology, geography, architecture, planning, and urban studies, even if they have quite different genealogies. Two fundamental understandings dominate today (Schmid 2015): A first one, which is particularly prevalent in the English-speaking world in the fields of political science and political geography, focuses on sovereignty and state power. It considers a territory as an abstract space over which a political body exercises power and control. In contrast, a second line, anchored in South American, Mediterranean and Francophone traditions, starts precisely with the materiality of the territory. This strand understands a territory as socially produced through human activity, labour, and symbolic practices. Thinkers such as Milton Santos, Saverio Muratori, Claude Raffestin, and André Corboz described a territory as appropriation, palimpsest, and socio-material production, forming a layered texture of borders, centralities, and networks, which are continually overwritten by historical processes and power constellations. In dialogue, the Italian Territorialist School, led by Alberto Magnaghi and Giancarlo Paba, reclaims territory as a living milieu and common good. Like Raffestin, they understand territory as a socially appropriated space that embodies memory, culture, and conflict (Perrone 2023). They extend the discussion toward a utopian horizon - the project of communities.

In postcolonial contexts, particularly in Latin America, the production of territory is understood as a dynamic and disputed process, which is bound to specific and multiscalar social contexts that harbour multiple temporalities (Streule and Schwarz 2017). Thus, territories are shaped by plural, overlapping, and contested processes between colonial impositions and customary systems. In China, in contrast, the concept of territory plays a key role in understanding the recent state driven forms of urbanization (Wong 2023).

In recent years, the concept of territory became indispensable for understanding the unequal implosions and explosions of capitalist urbanisation, demanding for the exploration of new pathways of inquiry. Thus, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid situate territory at the core of their concept of planetary urbanisation. Here, the challenge is epistemological: to grasp urbanisation as a planetary process reshaping the entire surface of the earth unevenly and violently.

In this session, we aim to reposition the debate on territory and discuss approaches that treat territories not as bounded units but as a set of contingent, contested, and reparative processes. We would also like to advance a productive and creative understanding of
re-territorialisation as a horizon, with the urgent task of re-embedding human and non-human life in sustainable, equal, just, and plural territorialities.

We invite theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that reflect and explore the following questions:
(1) tracing territorialisation as practice trough planning, urbanism, and struggles in everyday life;
(2) examining territorial metabolisms and more-than-human agencies;
(3) interrogating scalar and topological reconfigurations (regions, corridors, frontiers, platforms);
(4) exploring epistemologies of territory adequate to fragile, contested, and transitional contexts.

#83 Using photography in urban studies. Urban space seen and researched through the lens of the camera.

Session chair(s):

Judith Schnelzer (Insitute for urban and Regional Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences), Sandra Guinand, Katarína Očková

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

In the last decade new technologies and socio-technical devices have spurred a renewed interest for visual media, especially images and photography, in the field of urban studies. While there is a rich body of literature on visual studies, there has been limited application of photo methods in urban research (Conord & Cuny, 2015; Schoepfer, 2014; Guinand & al., 2021). Visual methods, and more specifically photography, come from the field of sociology (Harper, 2012; Rose, 2007) anthropology, and ethnography (Bateson & Meads, 1942; Collier & Collier, 1986; Schwartz, 1989). Few urban scholars have acknowledged the advantages of using photo-methods for data collection and knowledge production. Early examples of photos in urban research relate to the dominance of positivism in social sciences. Photos were often used for documentation or illustration, where they supported arguments through alleged “objectivity”. Critical voices cautioned that this practice of reifying existing knowledge about urban phenomena creates a so-called “truth effect” (Rose, 2003). An early prominent example is Jacob Riis’ (1897) How the Other Half Lives, where residents are portrayed in their living conditions in New York’s slums in the late 19th century, making audiences aware of urban housing inequality. Over the decades, scholars have developed the use of photography from solely documenting urban conditions or transformations towards more analytical approaches, including formalised analysis with AI. Current applications range from urban designers and planners applying photography as a means to improve their understanding of socio-spatial appropriation and space qualities (Whyte, 1980; Gehl & Svarre, 2013), to others who have considered it useful for studying intangible dimensions of socio-cultural phenomena such as territorial stigmatisation (Cuny, 2019) and metropolitan habitus (Dirksmeier, 2009). Even more so, participatory approaches use photographic methods as a tool give a voice and empower local communities (Wang & Burris, 1997).

Photography as a method can be broken down into different approaches depending on the involvement of citizens as participants in the research (and sometimes even beyond): photographic archive, the use of photography for documentation purposes (scenes of urban life, public spaces, etc.) or photography as an intermediary and interview medium, as well as a tool for knowledge production: for instance, photographic interview, photo-voice or photo-elicitation. In the scope of this session, we aim at rising discussions among scholars using different photographic approaches in their work.

• How can photographs be mobilized to bring out useful data and help feed research questions?
• What can be seen and collected through the lens of the camera and how?
• How to overcome the subjectivity of the frame and the depiction of “that moment”?

We welcome empirical, theoretical, and methodology-driven proposals that deal with photographic dimensions and issues from a qualitative but also quantitative perspective (AI, automated machine learning). We are especially interested in the use of this medium (how and what has been achieved), benefits, potentialities and shortcomings, questions and issues on the positionality of of the researcher(s) vis-à-vis participants, and discussion about ethical dimensions.

#84 Visual and Co-Creative Methods in Urban Studies: Rethinking Spaces Through Arts-Based Inquiry

Session chair(s):

Helena Segarra (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Miriam Haselbacher

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Visual and co-creative arts-based methods have gained increasing recognition in urban research for their capacity to challenge dominant epistemologies, capture lived experiences, and amplify underrepresented voices (Carpenter and Horvath, 2022; Trafí-Prats and Castro-Varela, 2022; Kroismayr et al., 2025). These methods also offer an entry point into understanding space not merely as a container or static backdrop, but as an ongoing production shaped by social, material, and symbolic interactions (Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005). This session critically engages with arts-based methodologies and 1) its potentials in enabling nuanced readings of space across diverse geographies, be they metropolitan neighborhoods, peri-urban zones, rural spaces, or borderlands, without reifying rigid spatial categories and with 2) its limits due to e.g. material and political factors as well as tensions between arts and science (Heines et al., 2024).

By bringing together contributions that expand and diversify the methodological toolkit of urban studies, this session explores how visual and co-creative methods illuminate spatial continuities, tensions, and overlaps. For instance, how might arts-based research contribute to understanding cities and urban life? How do co-creative methods reveal power dynamics, shifting land use, contested identities, or environmental concerns? How can participatory processes reframe local knowledge in ways that disrupt official narratives of spatial development or neglect? What methodologies facilitate the participation of underrepresented groups in urban research? Furthermore, we consider the methodological and ethical implications of working co-creatively with communities. What does it mean to “collaborate” in contexts shaped by power asymmetries, historical marginalization, or extractive research legacies? How can researchers remain accountable to the communities they engage with, and how might artistic practices offer alternative routes to reciprocity, care, and long-term engagement?

In this session we welcome contributions that grapple with such questions and invite scholars, practitioners, and artists to explore the role of visual and co-creative methods in urban spaces and beyond. By centering artistic and participatory practices, we seek to examine how visual tools, such as photography, video, mapping, drawing, and print, as well as collaborative processes, such as co-design, walking interviews, and community-based installations, can offer situated, affective, and embodied insights into spatial experiences and transformations.

We invite submissions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Visual explorations of space, place, and identity
• Arts-based research that studies contested, negotiated and (re)claimed spaces
• Reflections on the use of specific visual and co-creative methods and their ethical implication
• Potential and limits of visual arts-based approaches
• Intersections of aesthetics, activism, and knowledge production
• engaging with alternative ways of perceiving and experiencing space, moving beyond conventional spatial categories such as the urban–rural divide

The session aims to foster dialogue across disciplines, including but not limited to urban studies, geography, anthropology, visual sociology, design, and the arts. By focusing on the creative and collaborative dimensions of spatial research, this session seeks to open up new methodological horizons that can reframe how we understand and engage with complex, interconnected geographies.

#85 Political Lives of Policy Instruments in Land and Housing

Session chair(s):

Nicholas Shatan (University of California, Berkeley), Marcela Alonso Ferreira, Aurora Echavarria

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Title: Political Lives of Policy Instruments in Urban Land and Housing

Organizers:
Marcela Alonso Ferreira, PhD Candidate, Sciences Po Paris
Nicholas Shatan, PhD Candidate, University of California, Berkeley
Aurora Echavarria, Assistant Professor, Florida State University

Much urban scholarship has emphasized the brisk circulation of policies and models across cities and regions (Temenos and McCann 2013; Peck and Theodore 2015). Less attention, however, has been paid to the long-term processes of implementing and sustaining the technical devices that underpin land and housing policy: valuation formulas, fiscal schedules, eligibility criteria, cadastral tools, and so on. While often presented as unbiased or objective, these instruments embody deeply political choices (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2007), such as what constitutes value, where and how it is created, how it should be distributed between public and private actors, and who has rights over urban resources (Chhabria 2019; Lund 2020; Zaimi 2020; Cowan 2021; Weber 2021; Becher 2023).

This session invites contributions that trace the political lives of policy instruments in land and housing: how they persist as they are re-made, contested, and hybridized. We are especially interested in how these devices shape trajectories of urban inequality, influence access to land and housing, and configure relationships between the state, markets, society, and the city. Focusing on the durability and transformation of policy instruments can help reveal why they may persist across shifting political regimes, take seemingly illogical forms, or are reshaped through contestation or compromises reflecting constraints and opportunities of specific historical moments.

We welcome papers that address questions such as:

• What do new uses of old policy instruments reveal about contemporary shifts in urban governance, particularly under conditions of populist politics and constrained municipal capacity?
• Why are technical devices in land and housing taken up by actors outside of their intended users, or by groups with politics opposed to that of the original creators?
• How do technical devices and policy instruments encode and classify along lines of social difference (race, gender, class, nationality, normative family structure) and to what effects?
• How do political challenges give life to technical instruments, and how do technical challenges give life to political rationalities?
• How and why do seemingly small changes in calculation have outsized effects on urban life?
• How can approaches spanning from macro-level political economy to micro-level science and technology studies help us understand how such devices persist, are remade, or repurposed amid broader urban transformations?

We invite contributions that draw on a range of theoretical frameworks: from political economy, historical institutionalism, and the sociology of policy instruments, to science and technology studies, valuation studies, and the social studies of finance. Methodologies such as ethnography, archival research, process tracing, and comparative case studies are welcome. By bridging these perspectives, and inviting work across global contexts and historical periods, we aim to initiate a dialogue on how policy instruments themselves shape, reproduce, or unsettle inequalities in land and housing across diverse urban and political contexts.

#86 Intersectional Segregation

Session chair(s):

Hilary Silver (George Washington University), Paul Jargowsky

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

In capitalist housing markets, income sorting of residents is inevitable, while states can make it worse. In contrast, mixing policies - social housing, inclusionary zoning, mobility subsidies, and the like -- can moderate the development of concentrated poverty. Living in an area of concentrated poverty has been shown to have many short- and long-term negative effects (Chetty et al. 2014; Sampson 2024: Wilson 2020). But when income segregation is wedded to status group membership -- be it race, ethnicity, religion, language, and so on -- ghettos or enclaves often form (Marcuse 2005), where social exclusion reinforces and exacerbates material disadvantage. This multidimensional or "intersectional" segregation further reduces the odds of out-movement and social mobility, but may foster internal solidarity, identity and community development. Diversity, anti-discrimination, or integration policies targeted at residential group mixing aloneare rarer and more fraught.

This panel invites papers to address aspects of intersectional segregation in various national and urban settings, with preference for comparative analyses and theorizing that includes cases in the Global South. While racial segregation in the United States has been extensively studied, and ethnic or migrant segregation has been analyzed in selective European contexts, intersectionally and cumulatively disadvantaged spaces in other countries have received less attention (see Maloutas 2012; Musterd 2020). Segregation theories differ in emphasis on such factors as out–group avoidance or in–group affinity, socio-economic status and human capital, or place stratification reproduced by real estate agents, landlords, mortgage lenders, and neighbors (Crowder and Krysan 2016). Consequently, the impact of contextual variation on theoretical development nested in different regions of the world remains underdeveloped. While US research focuses on spatial concentration, social isolation, and the consolidation of race, place, and poverty, studies in some cities of the Global South call attention to different spatial configurations under such rubrics as informal settlements, townships, or slums in which group identities are under-explored. Relations within and across such neighborhoods also differ (Garido 2021). Papers on the similarities and differences in the specific groups that are spatially segregated, the exclusionary mechanisms at work in producing such group-based concentrations of poverty, and the effects of intersectional segregation are especially welcomed.
Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez. "Where is the land of opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 4 (2014): 1553-1623.
Crowder, Kyle and Maria Krysan (2016). Moving Beyond the Big Three: A Call for New Approaches to Studying Racial Residential Segregation. City & Community (2016)15, 1: 18-22.

Garrido, Marco. Reconceptualizing Segregation from the Global South. City & Community 20, no. 1 (2021): 24-37.

Maloutas, Thomas. Residential Segregation in Comparative Perspective. Routledge, 2012.

Marcuse, Peter. "Enclaves yes, ghettos no." Desegregating the city: Ghettos, enclaves, and inequality, ed. David Varady (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005): 15-30.

Musterd, Sako, ed. Handbook of Urban Segregation. Edward Elgar, 2020.

Sampson, Robert. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Wilson, William Julius. The truly disadvantaged. 2nd ed.

#87 Urban transformations and educational divide

Session chair(s):

Marta Cordini (Polytechnic of Milan), Xavier Bonal, Sheila Gonzalez Motos, Isabel Ramos Lobato Quentin Ramond

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Cities have become the primary arenas where the contradictions of inequality are most visible. Globalization, economic restructuring, and shifting governance regimes have reconfigured the social and spatial fabric of urban areas, intensifying divisions and producing new forms of exclusion. These dynamics profoundly affect education, as segregation, gentrification, and demographic change reshape the relationship between urban space and educational outcomes (Butler & Robson, 2003). In addition, the erosion of welfare protections and the liberalization of housing and education policies have weakened governments’ capacity to mitigate inequalities (Musterd et al., 2017), creating polarized urban landscapes where affluent enclaves coexist with marginalized districts and both residential and school segregation persist (Oberti, 2007). The persistence of school segregation, that has remained high and stable globally despite numerous policy efforts to reduce it (Gutiérrez & Carrasco, 2020) influences educational attainment and achievement (Lauen & Gaddis, 2013) and limits inter-class and inter-ethnic interaction, undermining social cohesion (Janmaat, 2012). The main drivers of school segregation have been identified in residential segregation, middle class school choice and school assignment policies (Bonal & Bellei 2018). The new challenges contemporary societies have to face complicate the intertwin between these three drivers and lead to unexpected and diversified outcomes. In some contexts, for instance, neighbourhood and school composition are becoming more divergent (Bischoff & Tach, 2020), while elsewhere high-income families increasingly use schools as mechanisms of social sorting (Kauppinen et al., 2022). Although school segregation often exceeds residential segregation (Cordini et al., 2019), recent evidence suggests this pattern may be shifting (Cucca & Mouratidis, 2025). These variations highlight the significance of contextual factors such as local housing markets, demographic change, and governance structures.

The housing crisis restricts low- and middle-income families’ residential options, while shrinking student populations can trigger school closures and reinforce disadvantage. Processes of gentrification, touristification, and urban renewal also transform neighbourhood composition and access to schools (López Gay et al., 2020). Education policies—particularly those promoting school choice and diversification—interact with these dynamics in ways that often deepen inequalities, despite being framed as equitable reforms (Ball et al., 1995).

Within this increasingly unequal and polarized system, some families from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds develop adaptive strategies to secure learning opportunities, often amid discrimination and exclusion (Carrasco et al., 2021; Ramos Lobato, 2019). This issue becomes more urgent in light of rising anti-immigrant sentiment and growing support for far-right parties worldwide. The intersection of urban transformation and educational inequality therefore demands renewed attention. By linking education to broader processes of socio-spatial change, researchers can better understand how structural inequalities are reproduced and contested in cities.

We invite papers that address the following topics:
• How migration flows, demographic change, and urban renewal reshape school segregation.
• The interaction between housing policies, gentrification, and access to schools.
• The role of school choice, admission rules, and parental strategies in reinforcing or mitigating inequalities.
• The effects of urban polarization on student mobility, school composition, and educational outcomes.
• Policy interventions aimed at reducing school segregation and promoting educational equity.

#88 Vertical Peripheries and the Rescaling of Housing Inequalities

Session chair(s):

Luisa Sotomayor (University of Toronto), Friederike Fleischer

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Over the past two decades, verticalization has emerged as a central strategy in mass housing programs, promoted as a response to land scarcity, informal urban growth and rising housing demand. This model has produced a distinctive urban form: large, often state-subsidized towers on the metropolitan edge, frequently constructed on former rural, informal or environmentally sensitive land. Particularly visible in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, but increasingly evident elsewhere, these vertical peripheries promise formalization and modernity, encouraging low-income households to pursue homeownership as a means of achieving social mobility. Yet this aspiration often entails heavy indebtedness and relocation to peripheral areas distant from employment, services, and political representation.
Developed through arrangements that combine public subsidy with private investment, these projects operate where limited state capacity meets speculative accumulation. Guided by state- and developer-led narratives of inclusion, these massified projects redefine citizenship through property, credit and control, often mediated by private governance structures, such as condominium or management boards. Rather than redressing inequality, these schemes tend to reproduce existing urban hierarchies and socio-ecological contradictions at the margins. Crucially, large housing complexes have become key instruments through which governments manage land, housing, and infrastructure, producing new configurations of density, environmental pressure, and social fragmentation that reshape how urban differences and inequalities are organized, negotiated and experienced at the metropolitan scale.

This panel, aligned with the RC21 theme “Inequalities and the City: Old Issues, New Challenges,” examines how verticalization is reshaping urban relations of power and governance by extending investment, regulation, and privatized planning across the metropolitan edge. It asks how these housing forms contribute to the rescaling of housing inequality, understood as the shifting distribution of resources, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities between state, market, and household actors in contemporary city regions.
Key themes include the political economy of verticalization, the changing roles of public and private actors in housing delivery, the financialization of social and low-cost housing, and the environmental and scalar politics of high-rise density. The panel also invites analyses of the collective and insurgent practices of adaptation, organization, and resistance emerging within high-rise peripheries, where residents negotiate the contradictions of formal inclusion and material exclusion. We welcome interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse contributions, including ethnographic, historical, political-economic, comparative, and design-based approaches. Together, these perspectives will deepen understanding of how housing and urban governance are rescaling inequality, citizenship, and belonging across contemporary metropolises.

#89 Unveiling the dark side of commons

Session chair(s):

Prof. Dr. Anna Steigemann (Universität Regensburg), Dr. Lorenza Manfredi, Mari Paz Agundez

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

“Commons” or the “practice of commoning” is often associated with something positive and beneficial for the development of more inclusive cities. Beyond physical resources such as land or urban infrastructure, the commons refers to the social process of organizing, managing, and caring for collective resources, while maintaining shared access and responsibility. Throughout history, the practice of commoning has been used to resist land privatization or the staggering gentrification, as the Rathausblock or Haus der Statistik in Berlin attest to. Moreover, as many scholars confirm, rather than exploiting the city as a consumable product, fostering the practice of the commons develops an understanding of the city as a collective right. A common space, in which citizens are recategorized as space producers, essential components of the urban landscape, yet implicitly carrying the responsibility to take part in the city-making.

However, commoning and maintaining participatory processes over time require a voluntary, yet deeply engaged human labor, often left unrewarded. Moreover, despite the “open” access these participatory processes advocate for, the reality is that only a limited group of engaged locals remains active in the participatory process/in the co-productive process. The reasons behind this issue are diverse, stemming from a probable short spread of information unable to reach a wider audience, the complexity in understanding the intricate web of actors and institutions managing the participatory processes, the difficulty in maintaining a long-term engagement from the citizens, or the accommodation of these processes in spaces that remain hidden or inaccessible to the greater majority.
Considering all the benefits that the commons and the practice of commoning promise in an urban context, it is crucial to critically examine the social dynamics underpinning these processes.

We therefore ask: Are commons always equal? Are commons always beneficial? What are the limits of commoning? In which spaces do commons unfold? And when does commoning become an exclusionary tool?

Our interest lies in exploring:
• Varied case studies from diverse geographies across both the Global North and South;
• Conceptual and terminological developments;
• Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion;
• Best-practice models, tools, and projects;
• The role of gender equality and ethnic diversity within these processes;
• Research examining both processes and outcomes;

Comparative analyses of models including co-production and co-optation.

Going a step further from participation, urban co-production expands the shared responsibility and decision-making beyond everyday urban residents, including institutions, such as municipalities or district planners. This collaborative approach fosters a common-good orientation as a step further to prevent privatization and counteract the forces of neoliberal urban development. These practices of commoning and co-production continue to evolve and mature; however, since they are still in development, there is a pressing need to examine them critically. We are looking for stories of success and failure to develop further the concepts of commoning and co-production, which are still not ripe.

#90 Securing the Unequal City: Policing, Profiling and Urban Resistance

Session chair(s):

Josefa Maria Stiegler (Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This panel invites contributions that analyze the multiple ways in which security regimes shape racialized, gendered and classed geographies of the city. Cities are not only spaces where inequalities take shape, they are also sites where they are enforced and contested. Policing practices—whether through formal law enforcement or informal community control—shape access to public space, housing, mobility and citizenship. These dynamics reveal how urban governance often relies on racialized imaginaries of “risk” and “disorder,” which position certain bodies and neighborhoods as threats to the urban order. Moreover, there is an increasing militarization of cities to facilitate a greater degree of surveillance and control.

This panel explores how security governance, policing and punitive crime policies operate as mechanisms that produce and reproduce urban inequalities, e.g., in the form of racial profiling. It also examines how these dynamics are challenged by residents, activists and civil society, highlighting counter-narratives and resistance practices that emerge in response. These initiatives contest dominant policing frameworks and open up possibilities for alternative urban futures grounded in care, solidarity and community-based safety.
The session aims to foster dialogue between scholars in urban studies, geography, sociology, criminology, anthropology, and related disciplines who seek to rethink how security and inequality intertwine in the making—and unmaking—of contemporary cities. Contrasting empirical case studies across different geographical and political contexts, it seeks to go beyond a Global South/Global North binary that is often reproduced in research on urban inequalities. The panel invites both theoretical reflections and empirically grounded studies that advance our understanding of policing and resistance along the lines of gender, race and class in urban contexts. Contributions may engage with conceptual debates on power, space and citizenship, or propose novel methodological approaches—including exploratory, collaborative or arts-based methods—to capture the complexities of urban inequality.

#91 Participatory and Deliberative Innovations in a Cul-de-Sac? Critical Accounts on How the Global Industry Neutralizes Political Change

Session chair(s):

Nazem Tahvilzadeh (Södertorn university), Roberto Falanga

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This panel explores transdisciplinary approaches to how participatory and deliberative innovations are crafted within a relatively new "global industry” that brings together decision-makers, practitioners, NGOs, and scholars around the production of conceptual and operational knowledge for the design and implementation of "good practices" that can remedy the poliycrisis of cities. Knowledge is necessarily produced within specific sociopolitical and territorial coordinates, shaped by bureaucratic routines, managerial logics, and market imperatives that celebrate innovations as remedies to the emerging deficits of democracy. However, critical research demonstrates that "good practices" for democratic governance frequently fall short of achieving expected results and/or comply with agendas that essentially reproduce existing inequalities and intersectional struggles. Therefore, by serving as an additional source of political legitimacy, participatory and deliberative innovations risk becoming the antithesis of what they are intended to be and deliver. Empirical studies further illustrate how mainstream tools orchestrated within the "global industry" tend to marginalize conflict, silence dissent, and bring little redistribution of power. While the panel aims to foreground both recent theoretical developments and innovative and critical empirical takes on participatory innovations, it also welcomes contributions on counter-currents. In particular, the panel is open to ongoing reflections on instances where citizens, activists, and municipalities re-politicize arenas by transforming them into spaces of contention and contestation. Therefore, we ask and invite papers with cross- and transdisciplinary methods and theory approaces on how deliberative and participatory innovations might be reclaimed for struggles over democratic redistribution, recognition, and representation. In particular we encourage South-North dialogues.

#92 Theorising and Practicing Housing Justice: Novel Definitions and Emancipatory Epistemologies

Session chair(s):

Carla Huisman (AISSR University of Amsterdam), Miguel A. Martínez, Abigail Friendly, Irene Molina, Femke van Noorloos, Mika Hyotylainen

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Housing inequality is one of the oldest yet deepening forms of inequalities in cities around the world. The current post-neoliberal shift poses new challenges for scholars interested in housing justice. While asset-based wealth often privileges elite actors, housing precarity is experienced by multiple urban dwellers globally. This session seeks to advance discussions of housing justice (Gustafsson et al. 2024) in critical urban and housing studies (Martínez 2024).

What is ‘housing justice’? How does context matter for experiences of and aspirations to housing justice? How do morals, values, ideologies and philosophies affect our notion of housing justice? How do critical theorisations of housing justice help understand contemporary unequal cities to develop transformative action?

A key aim of this session is to call for emancipatory epistemologies — geared towards both emancipation and the generation of knowledge — addressing how scholars can promote housing justice. Such ways of knowing would include, in particular, historically marginalised voices aiming to gain and share knowledge as well as promoting social justice (Huisman & Uitermark 2025). Such approaches entail, for example, knowledge sharing and critical thinking (Lima 2025) and knowledge co-production towards housing justice.

We are interested in papers addressing theoretical, conceptual, methodological and action-oriented issues related to housing justice globally, including ecological, feminist, anticolonial and degrowth perspectives. Papers should provide a critical theoretical approach and/or engagement with emancipatory epistemologies. We also welcome reflections aiming to understand intersections between housing justice and related notions such as urban and environmental justice. Likewise, interdisciplinary approaches and original theory-building are encouraged. As we intend to submit the selected papers to a special issue in an academic journal, the texts presented at this session of the RC21 conference should not be committed to other publications.

We invite papers addressing the following topics:

a) theories of social and housing justice, ranging from distributive justice (availability, affordability), to procedural justice (allocation, inclusion and exclusion mechanisms), and recognition justice (the right to housing, especially for marginalised groups);
b) urban and housing inequalities; the intersection between social justice and housing issues, including availability, affordability, security of tenure, and the physical and social state of the home and its surroundings;
c) social hierarchies and oppressions along class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, language, geography (Global North/South), ability, and housing tenure lines;
d) financialized and racial capitalism, authoritarian and far-right politics, patriarchy, and the ecocide;
e) progressive and reactionary grassroots struggles, ranging from everyday life to macro-political economic structures;
f) emancipatory epistemologies, new ways of engaging knowledge for social-housing justice.

References
Gustafsson, J., Listerborn, C., & Molina, I. (2024) Struggling for Housing Justice: New Theoretical and Methodological Approaches. Housing, Theory and Society, 41(5), 581–590.
Huisman, C. & J. Uitermark (2025) Emancipatory Epistemologies and Municipalist Policies. Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geografie, 116 (4), 387-390.
Lima, V. (2025) Knowledge production and learning in housing struggles. SN Social Sciences, 5, 76.
Martínez, M. (2024) Social and critical features of urban sociology. In Martínez, M. (ed.) Research Handbook on Urban Sociology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 26-49. Housing inequality is one

#93 Tourism, Mobility and Urban Inequality. Governing Overtourism in the 21st Century

Session chair(s):

Monica Bernardi (University of Milano-Bicocca), Neslihan Demirtaş Milz, Ko Koens, Kumru Çılgın Silvia Cesa-Bianchi

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

In the 21st century, tourism-related mobilities have intensified and diversified, reshaping urban spaces across the globe. Low-cost aviation, platform economies, real estate financialization, and city branding have converged to promote new mobile lifestyles and consumption patterns. These processes are deeply uneven: the capacity to move, settle, and benefit from tourism economies is highly stratified, producing new forms of inequality, exclusion, and environmental pressure. The COVID-19 pandemic, while temporarily reducing mobility, has reinforced the desire for movement and accelerated urban transformations driven by tourism.

Overtourism is therefore not simply a matter of “too many visitors.” It is a complex socio-technical assemblage (comprising infrastructures, algorithms, governance systems, and imaginaries) that redistributes urban resources and reconfigures everyday life. It affects housing markets, labour regimes, access to collective goods, and the resilience of urban environments. Short-term rental platforms and multi-listing hosts extract value from housing; cruise and excursion economies externalize noise, waste, and emissions; and destination marketing often privileges episodic, high-intensity consumption over everyday urban rhythms. These effects are never uniform: they are mediated by local histories, classed and racialized boundaries, gendered labour regimes, and environmental vulnerabilities.
At the same time, overtourism triggers experimentation and resistance. Municipal authorities, regional bodies, and grassroots collectives are testing new forms of regulation, citizen sensing, and commons-based governance. These initiatives reveal both the challenges and the possibilities of managing tourism mobilities in more equitable and sustainable ways.

This session explores how tourism mobilities, governance practices, and urban inequalities intersect in the age of overtourism. It invites comparative, multi-scalar, and interdisciplinary perspectives to understand how governance innovations, data infrastructures, and collective action can foster urban justice and resilience. We welcome theoretically informed and empirically grounded contributions that connect micro-level everyday frictions (noise, crowding, displacement) with macro-level processes (financialization, digital platforms, climate change, and post-pandemic reconfigurations of tourism).

We invite papers that address the following questions/topics:

1. How do tourism mobilities reproduce, intensify, or challenge existing urban inequalities and environmental injustices?
2. Which governance tools, policy mixes, and data infrastructures can manage overtourism and redistribute its costs and benefits more fairly?
3. How do residents, workers, and grassroots movements contest and reframe the pressures of overtourism and the right to the city?
4. In what ways do tourism economies reshape housing markets, labour relations, and urban commons in different geographic contexts?
5. How can concepts such as mobility justice, resilience, and environmental governance inform more sustainable and inclusive urban futures?

Keywords:
Overtourism; Tourism mobilities; Urban inequalities; Governance; Resilience; Housing and platform economies; Urban commons; Environmental justice; Mobility justice

#94 Radically (Un)Equal: The New Urban Platform Economy

Session chair(s):

Judit Bodnar (CEU, Vienna (formerly Budapest))

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

The recent arrival of the platform-based sharing economy--the P2P exchange of goods and services through digital platforms--quickly captured the entrepreneurial spirit and enchanted the masses. It has come with great promises: efficiency and sustainability through the use of idle resources, autonomy and flexibility at work, the opportunity to make easy money by trying oneself out in odd jobs, what one always wanted to do but could not, a quick stint of work during economic crises, and easier access to services that used to be largely confined to the middle classes. The fundamentally democratic core of P2P exchange held out the possibility of a more horizontally organized economy.

There is a growing recognition that sharing platforms haven't delivered on their democratic promises and the platform model of business is still trapped in the logic of capitalism. This panel is meant to examine how the urban platform economy contributes more specifically to the production of inequalities and the uneven production of urban space.

While the platform economy is not confined to the city, sharing platforms thrive particularly under the conditions of the density and mass anonymity of large cities, and they can be considered a primarily urban phenomenon. Short-term rentals (Airbnb), transportation platforms, such as ride hailing (Uber), or micro-mobility vehicle sharing (Lime), home restaurants (Eatwith), small service gigs (TaskRabbit), and non-sharing-based food delivery platforms (DoorDash, Wolt, Deliveroo, Zomato) fundamentally shape how residents use the city and its services and reconfigure urban infrastructure and economy. Some of these platforms have created a lot of buzz, been contested by long-term residents and municipal governments, and drawn strong criticism from social scientists. Are shared e-vehicles making urban transportation more sustainable? Do they turn people away from mass transit? Is food delivery primarily helping those with restricted mobility? Does the screening of guests and riders promote homophily and reinforce discrimination, or work against it compared to non-platform-based businesses? Who can make a living in the platform economy? How do housing platforms affect the transformation of residential buildings and entire neighborhoods in the long-run? Do they have a larger impact on the desertion of inner-city areas by permanent residents and the displacement of vulnerable populations? Are we witnessing a simple re-inscription of social inequalities through digital means in the new urban platform economy? Are there new mechanisms at work in the uneven production of urban space?

The session invites papers that address any aspect of these larger processes, how they play out in cities with different regulatory systems, municipal politics and policies, different desirability for tourism, in regions where there is an abundance of cheap labor and services, and in places where there is not. We welcome papers that build on empirical analysis from all regions of the world, more speculative kinds exploring the mechanism through which new inequalities are created or old ones are reinforced, and pieces that theorize the uneven development of platform capitalism at the urban scale.

#95 Still arguing over gentrification? Urban theory for the end of the world (or capitalism)

Session chair(s):

Simone Tulumello (Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa), Niccolò Cuppini (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

The world is on fire; and the urban world with it. The annihilation of Gaza and the grand plans, by the likes of Donald Trump and the Tony Blair Institute, for a brand-new Riviera city both encapsulate and push to an unprecedented limit the long history of the Janus-faced urban-violence nexus: the violence against the urban and the violence produced by urbanisation. The accumulation of expanding war, of the already devastating impacts of global warming and climate change, of the explosion of inequalities – which have in many places overcome tipping points beyond which speaking of inequality proper becomes hard – marks an age that is increasingly sparking apocalyptical fears: from preppers and billionaires buying estates in New Zealand to climate and anti-war activists, many agree we are running fast toward the end of the world, or maybe “only” of capitalism, as we know it – and of the urban as we have learned to know it at the same time.

And we are still arguing about gentrification (and touristification, and financialisation, and informality...). For instance, we – and in this “we”, we include the two of us writing these lines – are arguing about the epistemological limits of concepts generated decades ago and that, though powerful analytical instruments, may be incapable to provide instruments to chart the present and future we live in.

For this session, we invite papers that engage, through a plurality of epistemological and ontological lenses, with very complex questions that are easily formulated:

• What urban theory is possible at the end of the world?
• What urban theory we need toward the end of capitalism?
• Is urban theory even possible in the 21st century?
• What should urban theory for our present predicament look like?

Answering these questions, analytically and strategically, means not giving up the rich theorisations that urban studies and geography have worked and argued about during the last few decades in the meeting and clash of old and new lenses, at the intersection of Marxist, post- and de-colonial, feminist and queer, materialist and post-structuralist (and so on) lenses.
We invite, in a nutshell, papers capable of taking stock of old debates and pushing them to a new level of abstraction: beyond theorising the urban, we want to create a space to (re-)theorise urban theory for our time – before it is too late.

#96 Bodies, Inequality and Power: (Un)wanted, (un)housed and (un)essential bodies in the city

Session chair(s):

Luanda Vannuchi (Federal University of São Paulo), Claudia Wilopo

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

This panel seeks to interrogate how urban space affects different bodies at different times and how everyday life is shaped by mechanisms of power. By attending to the embodied dimensions of urban life, we seek to challenge the separation between body and environment, and to focus on situated ways of knowing the city rooted in lived experience and corporeal politics. We aim to spark discussions on the body as a site of investigation, a methodological tool, and an analytical approach to urban experience, as well as to bring together critical insights into how power operates through embodiment in contemporary urban space.

As cities undergo processes of urban development, urban policies and politics have disproportionately favored white, wealthy, masculine, and socially normative bodies while marginalizing and displacing more precarious and peripheral ones. Privileges are embedded in the urban planning, zoning regulations, surveillance practices, and mobility infrastructure of cities, affecting different bodies along intersecting axes of power such as gender, race, class, ability, and citizenship status. Meanwhile, urban life depends on the labor of precarious and migrant workers, whose contributions remain invisible and unvalued even as they sustain the very systems that allow the city to operate. For example, unhoused, racialized, and illegalized people are often positioned in the urban peripheries outside the boundaries of urban citizenship and belonging. They are deemed “out of place” through legal, spatial, and discursive mechanisms that determine who has the right to occupy, access, and shape urban space. Bodies themselves challenge dominant narratives of progress, inclusivity, and urban success. They can be the site and substance of urban debates, struggles, and protests.

Various scholars have explored ways the body is linked to personhood, identity, memory, resistance, and refusal, and showed that spatial politics is inherently biopolitical, shaping the way different bodies navigate the city. We aim to discuss approaches to how urban bodies relate to time and space by asking: Who is wanted, housed, and considered essential in the context of urban planning, policy, and politics? Which bodies are seen, supported, and celebrated or excluded, silenced, and rendered invisible? Who can conform to dominant urban norms and possibly challenge and disrupt them?

We invite contributions that engage with questions about how power, bodies, and space intersect in everyday life, particularly from scholars, activists, and practitioners from the Global South and East. We welcome papers exploring themes such as:

- How urban policies and planning have disproportionately favored white, middle-class, and male bodies, while marginalizing and displacing poor, racialized, and peripheral populations;
- How cities materially and symbolically produce distinctions between "wanted" and "unwanted" bodies;
- How emotion and affect circulate through bodies and space, revealing the politics of everyday urban life;
- How bodies, individually or in groups, challenge injustice, protest, and enact practices of solidarity.

#97 Tenants Against Rentier Capitalism: Innovations in Organising, Urban Inequalities, and Transnational Housing Politics

Session chair(s):

Lucas Vaquero Álvarez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)), Pablo Pérez Ruiz, Javier Gil García

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Across cities facing intensifying inequality, housing precarity, and the global reach of corporate landlordism, a new organising wave of tenants’ unions is transforming how urban class struggle is waged. From the Madrid Tenants Union, the London Renters Union, and the Los Angeles Tenants Union to newer formations across Europe and the Americas, organisations are deliberately importing labour-organising toolkits—structured one-on-ones, mapping and structure tests, majority thresholds, strike-ready escalations, and dues-based membership models—into the tenant field. This panel examines what is new, what works, and how these innovations convert case-by-case defense into durable, compounding power.

We invite contributions that identify mechanisms of innovation and trace their effects: e.g., how building-level mapping scales to city-wide leverage; how member-led governance (delegates, committees, steward systems) stabilises rapid growth; how strike funds, legal defense ecosystems, and CRM/digital stacks professionalise mutual defense without hollowing out democratic control; how cross-jurisdiction campaigns (against standardised extraction models and cross-border REITs) build transnational repertoires rather than ad-hoc solidarity.

We position these unions as proactive agents contesting the financialisation of housing and rent-extractive urban regimes under conditions of declining labour density, hegemonic homeownership ideology, and thin institutional support. We seek papers that specify how innovations travel across contexts (protocols, playbooks, training curricula, “campaign-in-a-box”), how they are adapted to different tenure regimes and legal geographies, and where they fail or backfire. We especially welcome analyses that foreground race, class, gender, and migration status in shaping recruitment pipelines, leadership reproduction, risk distribution, and organisational cultures.

The panel also interrogates the transnational horizon of tenant organising. While rentier capitalism is globally standardised—assetisation, platformised property management, and private-equity roll-ups—resistance often remains local. Yet infrastructures like the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City, the Autonomous Tenants Union Network, and recent international gatherings (e.g., Barcelona Housing Justice Encuentro, 2024) reveal early consolidation. We invite critical evaluations of these infrastructures: What are the bottlenecks (language, legal asymmetries, resourcing)? Which coordination mechanisms (synchronised action days, shared targets, data/OSINT hubs) travel across contexts? What constitutes meaningful internationalism when power is anchored in buildings and blocks?

We particularly welcome papers that:

- Demonstrate innovations in organisational form and strategy (base-building pipelines, member defense protocols, rent-strike architecture, dues/governance models).
- Compare mechanisms across cities/regions rather than single-site description, including the Global South and non-metropolitan contexts.
- Analyse metrics and evidence (win-rates, retention, density, leadership development, strike readiness) linking practice to outcomes.
- Theorise housing as a site of class formation, social reproduction, and political transformation under rentier urbanism.
- Evaluate transnational infrastructures of coordination and their limits.

By centring innovative mechanisms over generic narratives, this panel aims to sharpen scholarly and practitioner understanding of how tenants’ unions build power and with what consequences for urban inequalities and democratic life.

#98 Pretuguês as Counter-Public Sphere: Peripheral Epistemologies and Inequalities in the Latin American City

Session chair(s):

Rita Velloso (Federal University of Minas Gerais), Paolo Colosso, Carolina Lima, Isis Detomi

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Urban peripheries in Latin America and across the Global South have long been marked by structural inequality and contradictions, expressed in precarious access to housing, infrastructure and political participation. Yet, these spaces are also fertile grounds for practices of resistance and epistemological insurrections. This panel aims to explore how linguistic, cultural and collective praxis, emerging from peripheral groups, challenge hegemonic narratives, prefigure utopias and open up new imaginaries of the city.

Drawing on Lélia González (2020) concepts of “Pretuguês” and “Amefricanidade”, we emphasize the ways in which hybrid languages, diasporic practices and cultural insurrections constitute spaces of enunciation that contest hegemonic urban categories. These practices can be read as counter-publics (Kluge and Negt, 1973), in which subalternized groups establish new forms of political participation, belonging and critique. Rather than looking at peripheries merely as site of deprivation, this perspective foregrounds their role in the production of knowledge and alternative urban futures.

By situating culture and language as central to urban analysis, the panel seeks to rethink the relationship between inequality and resistance. Gonzalez’s takeaways on race, gender and coloniality are inseparable from the urban condition and everyday life, demanding analytical tools that can recognize the epistemological contributions of peripheral communities. The aim is to bring these contributions into dialogue with broader debates on inequality, citizenship and the right to the city.

We invite contributions that include attempts to answer questions around peripheral epistemologies, urban inequalities, intersecting inequalities, memory, enunciation and alternative urban knowledge. Research questions potential contributors may address include:

a) How peripheral territories develop alternative visions of the city and subaltern epistemologies?
b) How do hybrid cultural and linguistic practices emerging from the peripheries contest dominant urban discourses and generate counter-publics?
c) How are urban inequalities experienced, contested, and redefined through intersectional dynamics of race, gender, and spatial belonging?

The panel welcomes interdisciplinary contributions from sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, and cultural studies. Methodological approaches may include ethnography, participatory research, discourse and textual analysis, and comparative urbanism. The panel especially encourages theoretical interventions grounded in decolonial thought, feminist and Black feminist theory, counter-public theory, and critical urban studies. By highlighting such practices, this panel underscores the importance of cultural and epistemological struggles for understanding urban inequalities. It aims to foster dialogue on how peripheral epistemologies can inform critical urban theory, contribute to more inclusive public spheres, and reimagine the city as a space of collective resistance and transformation. The panel also aims to contribute to critical urban studies by foregrounding peripheral epistemologies as central to rethinking urban inequality, governance, and futures.

#99 Chronotopias of Uncertainty: Inequalities and the Multiple Temporalities of the City

Session chair(s):

Jose Eduardo Villanueva (Universidad Católica San Pablo), Lucia Alata

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Cities are not only divided by space or wealth. They are also divided by time. In many ways, inequality today is also temporal: while some people live in accelerated, hyperconnected realities, others inhabit slower or suspended urban times. From this perspective, time becomes an urban metamaterial: intangible yet materially shaping space.

This approach emphasises anthropological and scientific underpinnings, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, adapted from relativistic physics to describe the inseparability of space and time in narrative, and expanded here into urban chronotopia: the simultaneous manifestation of multiple temporalities within a single urban point.

This session explores how these overlapping chronotopias shape new forms of urban inequality. This also overlaps with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, reinterpreted through an urban lens: the more we try to define or control the city, the less we understand the complexity of how it’s lived. This idea helps us question how uncertainty, rather than being a condition to eliminate, can reveal the fragility and diversity of urban experiences. Especially in contexts of inequality, climate crisis, and technological transformation.

In this sense, chronotopias of uncertainty refer to those urban situations where different temporalities coexist: fast and slow, digital and analog, precarious and stable. These overlapping times create tensions but also opportunities to rethink how we inhabit and design our cities. Understanding time as a social and political dimension allows us to see how inequalities are reproduced not only through space, but also through the rhythms of daily life, waiting, access, and adaptation.

The session invites contributions that explore how uncertainty and time intersect with inequality — both theoretically and through grounded, local cases. Some guiding questions would include:

How do different urban communities experience and negotiate uncertainty in their everyday lives?
What happens when multiple temporalities, such as technological, social and ecological, overlap in the same urban space?
How can planning, design, and policy acknowledge the diversity of urban times?

We welcome papers from sociology, anthropology, urban studies, architecture, geography, and related fields. Comparative or cross-regional perspectives, particularly from the Global South, are especially encouraged. Case studies, visual research, or artistic approaches are also welcome, as they often reveal temporalities that remain invisible to traditional urban analysis.

Ultimately, this session proposes to open a space for reflection on how uncertainty, far from being only a problem, can become a lens to understand — and possibly rebalance — the unequal times of the city. By thinking about chronotopiasas both a theoretical and experiential framework, we can start reimagining urban life beyond fixed forms, and toward more flexible, inclusive, and time-sensitive futures.

#100 Housing Decarbonization as Field of Capital Accumulation

Session chair(s):

Lisa Vollmer (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner Germany), Melissa García-Lamarca, Justin Kadi

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Twenty-seven percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions stem from the building sector (UNEP 2020). Hence, the decarbonization of housing provision – its construction and operation – is essential to counter climate change. At the same time, housing provision is in a deep affordability and accessibility crisis. The extraction of profit from housing through commodification and financialization contradicts its function as basic need and as place of reproduction and care, (re)producing social inequalities. In this context, governments at various levels have introduced measures to foster housing decarbonization. Yet rather than contributing to equality, e. g. by improving living conditions for those in poorly insulated housing, these measures often trigger green/low-carbon gentrification that benefit middle and upper classes, while exclude working class and racialized residents.

The dynamics around housing decarbonization go beyond the unjust distribution of costs and benefits, however. Real estate, the construction sector, energy providers and other capital fractions increasingly view housing decarbonization as a means to extract profit - a new field of capital accumulation. Employing established or innovative strategies, they use the “greening” of housing to maximize returns, drawing on existing regulatory frameworks or pushing for new ones. These strategies cover different aspects of housing, from construction, management strategies and maintenance practices, to financial instruments in financing and securitization: retrofitting that enables the closure of commodification gaps (Edwards and Bulkeley 2017, Großmann 2019, Knuth 2019), the outsourcing of heat provision to heat contractors, the integration of sustainability into risk calculations through ESG-investment (Parish 2025), the targeting of “green” new housing to higher-income groups, new financial instruments to promote “greening” (Taylor and Knuth 2025), or the establishment of decarbonization as investment product (Knuth 2016).

The panel invites contributions that focus on one of the following aspects (or their interconnection): 1. How (new) regulatory frameworks enable capital accumulation though housing decarbonization. 2. How companies adapt their business models or create new accumulation strategies around housing decarbonization. 3. How emerging conflicts around anti-Environmental Social Governance (ESG) investing (Harmes 2025) is impacting capital accumulation through housing decarbonization.

Papers may address one or more of the following questions:

• How do (changing) regulatory frameworks of housing decarbonization influence the opportunities of capital accumulation?
• What are the effects of the introduction of mandatory Energy Performance Certificates on the real estate sector and retrofit industry?
• How is the ecological transformation of housing related to financialization? What role do large scale investors and landlords play in establishing housing decarbonization as field of capital accumulation?
• How do interest of state and capital contradict or align? How do interest of real estate and other capital fractions (e. g fossil fuel industry) contradict or align?
• How does the current movement against climate measures by (right-wing) governments affect the ability of capital accumulation in housing decarbonization? What are the broader political/geo-political challenges for housing decarbonization?

We are looking for empirical and contributions and are particularly interested in how the above plays out in different geographies. Single case studies and comparative papers are welcome.

#101 Foundational economies in (un-)equal cities

Session chair(s):

Hans Volmary (Technical University Dresden), Luca Biserna, Tatjana Neuhuber

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

The global regime of profit-driven and growth-centred economies lies at the heart of climate breakdown, whilst also falling short of providing decent living standards for all. Within this system, cities have developed as nodal points of a global economy based on the continuous redistribution of wealth within countries, as well as the exploitation of natural resources and labour in the “Global South”/majority world. Consequently, there is much emphasis on the role of cities in eco-social transformations. On the one hand, they are sites of unbounded consumption and account for almost three quarters of global GHG-emissions. On the other hand, they serve as key arenas for struggles over global climate justice as well as social and spatial inequalities at the local level. Their significance becomes even more prevalent, given the projections of “planetary urbanisation”.

Against this background, the Foundational Economy (FE) has developed as a concept and policy paradigm proposing an alternative for organising urban economies. It employs a sectoral understanding of economic processes, with some being foundational to satisfying basic human needs (e.g. water, energy, health), while others are merely creating monetary value for private companies and investors (e.g. finance, insurance and real estate). According to FE-scholars, the privatisation and commodification in those sectors that are foundational is undermining quality and access for large parts of urban populations. They also argue that providing public foundational infrastructures is significantly more climate-friendly, while limiting social and spatial inequalities due to the redistributive effects of collective instead of private consumption. In addition, recent feminist interventions have accentuated the role of de-privatising social infrastructures in redistributing care (work).

In this session we invite contributions investigating the potential of alternative ways of organising urban economies in eco-social transformations according to principles of the foundational economy. Conceptual contributions could attempt to develop the concept further to answers to its structurally inscribed Eurocentrism or feminist critiques of a lingering neglect of the role of care work. Connections to related concepts such as universal basic services (UBS) or social provisioning are welcome as well. Empirical contributions could focus on in-depth studies of single cities/sectors as well as the role and potential of participation in implementing foundational provisioning. We also invite comparative studies either between cities or between sectors of the foundational economy. We specifically invite contributions from/about cities outside of Western Europe.

The session is intended as an open exchange on the potentials and limits of the foundational economy in eco-social transformations and the organisers will submit a special issue proposal based on the contributions to this session.

#102 Neurodiversity, Inequalities and the City

Session chair(s):

Rosalie Warnock (King's College London)

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

In recent years, neurodiversity has become a buzzword in popular and academic discourse; something which now runs the risk of being coopted under neoliberalism (Runswick-Cole, 2014). But for people who are neurodivergent – a community-developed term describing those who experience the world in a different way to the neurotypical majority – there is nothing ‘new’ or ‘novel’ about it (Davidson and Henderson, 2010). Neurodivergence can bring all sorts of gifts – but it can bring challenges, too. For example, heightened sensory sensitivities can make busy urban environments unbearable (Davidson and Henderson, 2010). Difficulties with executive function can make travelling through the city even more challenging (Alarasi et al, 2025). And neurodivergence cannot be separated from the additional intersecting disadvantages of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability, and (co-occurring) disability (Angell and Solomon, 2014; Lewis and Arday, 2023;).

Sociologists and geographers have only very recently started to follow the lead of critical disability studies and other disciplines in examining neurodiversity in more detail (see e.g. Grummt, 2024; Kenna, 2023). The earlier work of a few pioneering neurodivergent scholars (e.g. Davidson and Henderson, 2010; Singer, 1996) is central to this. But there is so much more to do, empirically, theoretically, and methodologically.

This interdisciplinary session encourages contributors and attendees alike to employ neurodiversity as a lens for understanding different and intersecting forms of inequality in the city.
• How, for example, might neurodivergence compound experiences of family homelessness?
• How might the urban environment be structured – physically, socially or bureaucratically – to favour neurotypical people? How might a neurodivergent perspective disrupt or nuance the concept of the right to the city?
• What is the relationship between neurodiversity, ageing and the city?
• How might we ‘neuroqueer’ the city?
•And finally – what might “neurodivergent joy” in the city look like – and how might neurotypicality restrict this?

This will be a regular panel session, but contributors are welcomed to test the boundaries of what that means if they so wish. Papers can be theoretical, empirical, or methodological in focus. Submissions are particularly welcome from scholars from the Global South and/or in contexts which disrupt Western hegemony over neurodiversity and the neurodivergent experience.

#103 Regeneration and the Remaking of Urban Inequalities

Session chair(s):

Paul Watt (London School of Economics and Political Science), Zheng Wang

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Regeneration has been a prominent feature of urban development across cities in the Global North and South for several decades. Whilst regeneration discourses are spatially specific, their broad underlying contours are fairly consistent, i.e. physical redevelopment promoted by the state with variable levels of private sector fiscal and governmental involvement. Regeneration is often associated with the remaking of urban inequalities, for example via enhancing processes of state-led gentrification in the Global North (Watt and Smets, 2017; Morris, 2019; Watt, 2021), or through large-scale resettlements in the Global South and East (Goodfellow et al.; Wang, 2022; Williams et al., 2022). In this session, we wish to highlight the manifold ways that regeneration reshapes contemporary landscapes of urban inequalities, which may include gentrification but is by no means restricted to gentrification-related issues. Hence, we are interested in theoretical, methodological and empirical research papers which explore how regeneration remakes urban inequalities along class, racial/ethnic, gender, disability, religious and intersectional lines, and this includes the spatial contours of such social inequalities.

Some of the research questions that we are interested in include:

• ‘what are the aims of regeneration projects vis-à-vis urban inequalities?’;
• ‘how do the end results of regeneration change such inequalities?’; ‘how do these changes match onto the original regeneration aims?’;
• ‘to what extent do urban political economies determine or pre-determine how regeneration reshapes inequalities’;
• ‘how does contestation and resistance from below affect the manner in which regeneration reshapes urban inequalities’;
• ‘does regeneration produce socially uneven inequalities in that some inequalities are ameliorated whilst others are enhanced or vice versa?;
• 'do certain types of regeneration exacerbate urban inequalities more than others?'; and 'what are the policy implications of regeneration vis-a-vis urban inequalities?
• 'One theme which could be explored is how the temporal process of regeneration unfolds over time – often elongating way beyond the original deadlines – and therefore 'how does such regeneration elongation itself change urban inequalities?'

We are interested in papers which explore the above themes and questions using a range of methods and theoretical approaches.

#104 The Housing–Climate Nexus: Conflicts, Controversies, and Alternatives

Session chair(s):

Lorenzo Vidal (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Carlos Delclós, Frances Brill Maxime Felder, Jacob Geuder

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

"Mainstream solutions to the variegated challenges presented by the housing and climate crises often conflict with one another, due to a profound misalignment between ecological imperatives and social needs. The “green” versus the “just” city, ecological responsibility versus affordability, carbon savings versus inclusion. The opposition between the ecological and social goals of policy “solutions” give way to a core antagonism in contemporary urban political economies, often conceptualised as an ""eco-social paradox"" (Holm, 2011) or a ""new socio-ecological contradiction"" (Rice et al., 2020: 145) conditioning processes of climate adaptation and social reproduction. An illustrative example is a prevailing logic that frames large-scale housebuilding as the primary solution to widespread problems of housing affordability. This approach not only underestimates the environmental costs of construction, but also reinforces the growth-oriented imperatives driving urban development. Conversely, climate mitigation strategies centred on energy efficiency retrofits often fail to account for their negative effects on affordability (Delclós and Vidal, 2021), their role in driving “renovictions” (Polanska and Richard, 2021), or their relationship with “green gentrification” (Anguelovski et al., 2018). Both tendencies likely reinforce and reproduce property and investment regimes that remain insufficiently problematised within academic and policy debates alike.

We invite contributions that analyse these contradictions and explore pathways toward more socially and ecologically just urban futures. How do urban actors such as policy makers, tenants, planners, private sector actors, or housing movement activists navigate (seemingly) competing priorities between social and environmental goals? How do specific housing and climate policies reinforce or undermine existing inequalities or ecological limits in a given territory? How do social actors frame the climate and housing crises through collective action? How do contradictions lead to controversy, and how are these controversies publicly debated? How do tensions arise from the consideration of different temporal horizons (e.g., short-term versus long-term) and spatial scales (more local concerns versus more global approaches)?

We invite papers that address the following topics:
• Case studies of urban conflicts and controversies at the intersection of housing and ecological agendas (e.g. Polanska and Richard, 2021).
• Policy and discourse analyses, as well as controversy mapping, critically examining how climate and housing interventions are framed, implemented, and legitimated.
• Discussions of sufficiency-based approaches to housing stock redistribution and alternative models of provision (e.g. Horn et al., 2025; zu Ermgassen et al., 2022)
• Radical strategies for housing decarbonisation that challenge prevailing property and investment regimes (e.g. García-Lamarca, 2025).

The panel seeks to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue bridging structural critique with grounded research. By catalysing collective reflection on the housing-climate nexus, we hope to advance theory and practice beyond the confines of growth-dependent urbanism, toward a more equitable and sustainable political economy of housing."

#105 Smart and Stratified: Platform Capitalism and Inter-Urban Inequality

Session chair(s):

Oskar Steiner (Sciences Po), Antoine Courmont

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

In the current era of “platform capitalism,” the production, accumulation, and exploitation of data has become a primary vector of economic activity and growth. This development has pronounced consequences for urban governance. Digital firms have seized upon the city as both a resource and a market for data-driven goods and services, while local authorities have (to varying degrees) attempted to steer, appropriate and regulate digital platforms to public ends. Platform capitalism has catalysed a new round of strategic negotiations between public and private actors in the city, the outcomes of which are driving transformations in the instruments, infrastructures, institutions and imaginaries of urban governance.

An important set of questions have emerged relating to the effects of platform capitalism on the shaping of urban inequality. On the one hand, digital platforms in the city may structure the inclusion of certain residents and the exclusion of others. They are vectors for the reproduction of inequalities between urban actors as they are governed. On the other hand, digital platforms in the city attribute an uneven capacity to know and intervene in urban life. They are vectors for the reproduction and transformation of inequalities between urban actors as they govern.

Yet if the mechanisms through which platform capitalism is shaping inequalities within territories are increasingly understood, the ways in which it is shaping inequalities between territories are currently less clear. While it is evident that different cities are being integrated into platform capitalism's value chains in different ways—and able to appropriate these positions to different effects—our understanding of the economic, political, and technological drivers of this differentiation remains limited.

This session, accordingly, invites a methodologically diverse range of theoretical and empirical contributions that interrogate the mechanisms through which platform capitalism is contributing to the (re)making of inter-urban inequalities. Contributions should seek to uncover how the ongoing intersection of corporate strategies, public action, and technological innovation is producing differentiation between territories, and asymmetries in the horizons and governance of urban areas.

Contributions may wish to interrogate this development along any of the following (non-exhaustive) thematic axes:

-Uneven materialities: Drivers and consequences of differences between the digital infrastructures of territories (constraints, affordances, harms and benefits…)

-Uneven coverage: Drivers and consequences of the differential deployment of digital goods and services across territories (inclusion and exclusion, rejection and acceptance…)

-Uneven models: Understanding the diverse and distinct forms of platform capitalism across territories (as shaped by local agency, historicity, economic contexts, legislative environments, corporate strategies, material constraints...)

-Uneven positions: Modelling and describing how cities and regions are positioned in global value chains of platform capitalism (territorial specialization, extraction, accumulation, dependency or interdependence…)

-Uneven valuations: Understanding the role of algorithmic platforms and platform capitalism in ranking, classifying, qualifying, and reordering urban areas.

-Uneven futures: Understanding how platform capitalism comes to represent different promises, problems, narratives, and imaginaries in different territories, and how these futures are contested or redefined.

#106 Contested Governance: Autocratization, Democratic Backsliding, and Urban Politics

Session chair(s):

Ülkü Doganay (Humboldt University of Berlin), Oksana Zaporozhets, Oleg Pachenkov, Ana Pajvančić-Cizelj (University for Continuing Education Krems), Elisabeth Donat

Format type:

Regular Panel

Description:

Democratic governance is under pressure globally. Across diverse contexts, we observe processes of autocratization, democratic backsliding, and the erosion of checks and balances, civil liberties, and rule of law. Cities are both sites where these authoritarian tendencies manifest and arenas where resistance, contestation, and democratic defense are organized. Urban governance arrangements — including municipal autonomy, civil society space, and citizen participation mechanisms — are being reshaped by these broader democratic crises, with profound implications for urban politics, policy, and everyday life. This session examines the urban dimensions of autocratization and democratic backsliding, as well as efforts to defend and deepen democratic governance in challenging political contexts.

We seek to understand how authoritarian tendencies reshape urban governance at multiple scales: from restrictions on civic space and independent media, to centralization of power and attacks on municipal autonomy, to surveillance and control of public space and protest. The session also explores how cities and urban social movements respond to democratic erosion through various forms of resistance, alternative governance experiments, and transnational solidarity networks.

We are particularly interested in papers that analyze the contested nature of urban governance in contexts of democratic stress. How do national-level autocratic tendencies affect municipal politics and policy autonomy? What strategies do urban governments employ to protect democratic space and resist authoritarian encroachment? How do social movements, civil society organizations, and citizens contest autocratization through urban political action? And what forms of solidarity and transnational learning emerge among cities facing similar challenges?

We welcome contributions on the following topics:
• Autocratization processes and their manifestations in urban and regional governance
• Attacks on municipal autonomy and the centralization of urban policy control
• Restrictions on civic space, protest rights, and freedom of assembly in cities
• Surveillance technologies and authoritarian control of urban space
• Urban social movements and resistance to democratic backsliding
• Progressive municipal governments in hostile national and regional contexts
• Transnational municipal networks and solidarity across authoritarian contexts
• Comparative perspectives on autocratization and resistance across different regional and political contexts
• Possibilities for democratic renewal and deepening through urban experimentation.

#107 Research–Activist Collaborations and the Politics of Urban Inequalities in the Global South

Session chair(s):

Sobia Kaker (Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Essex), Ayesha Shahid

Format type:

Round Table

Description:

This roundtable invites critical reflection on the challenges, strategies, and possibilities of scholar–activist collaborations in contexts where inequality is entrenched and state receptivity to pro-poor interventions is limited. Framed within the conference theme “Inequalities and the City: Old Issues, New Challenges”, the session situates itself in long-standing debates on the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1968; Harvey, 2012), urban social movements (Holston, 2009; Nicholls, 2008), and the expanding repertoire of innovative methodologies used to understand and contest dispossession, displacement, and disenfranchisement (Simone, 2018; Roy and Rolnik, 2020; Harb, 2021).
As global academic attention to urban challenges grows—often shaped by funding priorities and institutional pressures—how can scholars working in or on Global South cities, particularly those outside the framework of ‘urban labs,’ confront and respond to the unique challenges of conducting engaged, activist, and policy-relevant research in these contexts? Governments may be hostile to critical scholarship, and activist groups can find themselves surveilled, delegitimised, or excluded from official policy conversations. Against this backdrop, the roundtable asks: what does it mean to “make impact” when there is no receptive platform for research–activist collaborations to land? What counts as success when possibilities for pro-social and pro-poor policy engagement are increasingly constrained?
The discussion will address the following interlinked questions:
1.How can research move beyond publications to mobilise social justice and collective action beyond affected (and often exhausted) participant communities?
2.How can scholarly work that seeks to resist evictions, dispossessions, and expulsions best navigate the tension between engaging with bureaucracies that often sustain the status quo and aligning with progressive political movements that are still emerging or fragile?
3.Where should research “land” to produce meaningful effects in policy and practice?
4.What metrics of success make sense in contexts where state power is increasingly exclusionary and resistant to progressive agendas?
5.Where should we best situate scholarly that resists evictions, dispossessions and expulsions. between appealing to status-quo maintaining bureaucracies and (often fledgling) progressive political movements?
We particularly seek contributions from scholars working in Global South contexts who have grappled with these tensions in their own work. Participants are invited to explore advocacy after publication, the afterlives of research in activist campaigns, and/or reflections on failure as a form of knowledge production. We are keen to foreground the experiences of early career colleagues and those whose work, campaigns, or collaborations remain under-recognised, to enable a candid conversation about frustrations, learnings, and solidarities.
By bringing together diverse perspectives, this roundtable aims to deepen conversations about urban inequalities while pushing methodological and political imaginations. It will foreground activist collaborations not as ancillary to scholarship, but as central to rethinking what it means to claim the right to the city under conditions of austerity, authoritarianism, and ecological precarity.