Call for Sessions

The next RC21 conference will be held in Vienna on 20-22 July 2026. The Research Committee 21 (RC21) on the Sociology of Urban and Regional Development of the International Sociological Association was established in 1970 to promote theory and research in the field and create an international community of scholars who will advance the field. The 2026 conference will be hosted by Department of Sociology and the Research Platform “The Challenges of Urban Futures” at the University of Vienna and organized by a Local Organising Team comprising scholars from different universities in Vienna and members of the RC21 board.

The conference, under the broad theme of “Inequalities and the City. Old Issues, New Challenges”, seeks to engage with the (continuing) challenges posed by urban inequalities while exploring innovative perspectives and methodologies.

Cities have long been spaces where social, economic, political and environmental inequalities are produced, reproduced, contested, and addressed through various forms of collective action. Questions of access to housing, basic goods, employment, livelihoods, education, welfare services, and public spaces have historically shaped social sciences, in particular urban and regional studies, and remain central today. These persistent challenges intersect with multiple, intertwined dynamics that are reshaping (urban) life in complex ways. Across the world, in the Global ‘North’ and ‘South’, inequalities are deepening under the combined effects of economic and technological transformations; climate change; environmental degradation and depletion; armed conflicts; neo-colonial, exclusionary and xenophobic political projects, etc. To some extent, those dynamics challenge traditional analytical, methodological and theoretical frameworks for understanding inequalities, citizenship, integration, belonging, and the collective action capacity of social actors and institutions.

We invite proposals for sessions that critically explore how old and new inequalities are produced, expressed, contested and addressed in cities and regions across the globe, by scholars from various disciplines of urban and regional studies. Broader topics can also be explored in proposed sessions. We welcome contributions from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives. In bringing together insights from across the world, we seek to foster comparative discussions within and between sessions, which help us to better understand multiple forms of inequalities, and how to address them, in an era of profound uncertainty, transformation and violence.