Call: Urban Lab+ London Symposium

Global Urban Higher Education: the challenges and potentials of internationalisation
16-17 September 2015 UCL Urban Laboratory, University College London

Deadline: 11 AM GMT, Monday 27 April 2015

In a world that is both rapidly urbanising and globalising, it is widely acknowledged that it is crucial to facilitate urban education that is based on global knowledge and addresses international issues. But it is not always clear how this can be best implemented in practice, especially to ensure urban education plays a constitutive role in addressing issues of urban inequality and global disparities in the production of urban knowledge, and in the application of expertise.

University College London (UCL) will be hosting a major international symposium on global approaches to urban higher education on 16 and 17 September 2015. This event forms part of the Urban Lab+ initiative funded by the European Commission's Erasmus Mundus programme and including eight urban laboratories from across the world.

These units have in common their dedication to multi-/cross-/inter- and trans-disciplinary learning; their emphasis on hands-on collaborative research and education; and their attempts to bring together the disciplinary resources of the academy with the practical spheres of architecture, urban design and planning. Working in partnership the labs have been engaged in conversations focused on how interdisciplinary, practice-oriented and international approaches to built environment education relate to the question of urban social inclusion and exclusion.

More Infos:External links
urbanlabplus.eu
ucl.ac.uk/urbanlab
#urbanlabplus

 

Summer School in 'Urban Culture in Theory and Action' - Copenhagen University

The Summer School in 'Urban Culture in Theory and Action' (Copenhagen University, Denmark), 10th to 22nd of August 2015 is accepting applications. 

The course focuses on cultural entrepreneurship and social innovation in the city by combining urban theory with hands-on practice. Through a combination of lectures, seminars, tutorials, workshops and field trips, the student will engage with cultural practitioners and urban theorists from across the world. Bringing academic knowledge of urban life together with empirical know-how generated by practitioners, the program do-it-yourself approach will help students develop their own ideas into project proposals that can inspire entrepreneurship and innovation in their home cities.

The program is tied together with the simultaneous Strøm electronic music festival and embedded within Copenhagen’s alternative spaces, particularly the co-creative community PB43. Using Copenhagen as a laboratory for studying music, art and innovative use or development of urban space, the course also opens up to cross-cultural and global perspectives through presentations of research from Asia and the Middle East.

The summer school is open to applicants at MA-level from across the world. Please refer to http://urban.tors.ku.dk/enrollment/ for more information.

Call for Articles: Urban Imaginaries

Diffractions - Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture

Issue 5 | Urban Imaginaries

Deadline for articles: April 30 2015​

As James Donald put it long ago, “there is no such thing as a city”. As a complex product of both material and imaginary forces, cities are plural entities at the intersection of geographically and historically specific institutions, governmental intervention, global market relations, political participation and creative transgression. In this constitutive diversity, Donald argued, the city “is above all a representation”. Indeed, the city is continuously made and remade through acts of imagination, grounded as much in the materiality of physical space as in the historically constituted ideas about urban life. In the vein of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”, cities, as nations, can be conceived as spaces imagined into existence through multiple forms of representations and collective interactions.

Cities have become, more than ever, an outlet of often clashing social energies, where internal tensions and translocal connections intersect to shape but also contest the way urban life is configured and experienced. The popularity of the term “glocalization” - “the simultaneity – the co-presence – of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies” (Robertson, 1992) - suggests that global fluxes have led both to globalizing impulses and to multiple reactions against cultural uniformity through the “production of locality” (Appadurai, 1996). As social spaces where contradictory impulses coexist, cities are the site of political, legal and economic regulation, but also of creativity and dissenting practices.

Several authors have proposed the term “new metropolitanism” (Lenz et al. 2006) as a new concept to account for urban agency with regard to the material, cultural, social, and political processes that inform daily practices in a metropolitan setting. Drawing a divide between the history of modern metropolis - thoroughly scrutinized by the likes of Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel - and contemporary world cities, the term “new metropolitanism” pays attention to the reorganization of present-day urban spaces, driven by cosmopolitan ideals, multicultural imaginaries, global economic transformations, political participation and creative vitality. At the same time, the term can be an analytic resource to tackle the conflicting forces at play in contemporary cities, seen as sites of emancipatory fantasies and associative imagination, but also of control, coercion and exclusion.

Rather than unified forms then, cities are heterogenous spaces where “urban cultures of difference” (ibid, 19) come into contact, where conflict and struggle constitute experience and drive change (Brantz et al, 2014). This issue wishes therefore to examine the ways in which cultural and political imagination have shaped and contested the configuration and experience of historical and present-day urban space.

Topics may include but are not restricted to the following:

- Metropolitanism and urban cultures of difference

- Globalization, translocality and placemaking

- Austerity urbanism and post-industrial cities

- Dynamics of creativity and gentrification

- The right to the city: Urban citizenship and participatory culture

- Boundaries, centres and peripheries

- Ghost cities

- Cities and colonial imagination

- Experiencing the city: tourism and authenticity

- City branding

- Entrepreneurial and smart cities

- Surveillance and Public Space

- Cities as affective spaces

- Urban imagination in literature and the arts

We look forward to receiving full articles of no more than 20 A4 pages (not including bibliography) and a short bio of about 150 words by April 30 2015 at the following address: submissions@diffractions.net<mailto:submissions@diffractions.net>.

Diffractions welcomes articles written in English, Portuguese and Spanish.

Please follow the journal’s submission guidelines at http://www.diffractions.net/submission-guidelines.

DIFFRACTIONS also accepts book reviews that may not be related to the issue’s topic. If you wish to write a book review, please contact us at reviews@diffractions.net<mailto:reviews@diffractions.net>.

Diffractions is the online, open access and peer-reviewed journal of the doctoral program in Culture Studies hosted by the Lisbon Consortium and the Catholic University of Portugal. Find us online at www.diffractions.net<http://www.diffractions.net/>.

Global Power City Index 2014....Hmmm.....

 

The Global Power City Index (GPCI) evaluates and ranks the major cities of the world according to their “magnetism,” i.e. their comprehensive power which allows them to attract creative individuals and business enterprises from every continent and to mobilize their assets in securing economic, social and environmental development. 

http://www.mori-m-foundation.or.jp/gpci/index_e.html

ISSC Project: Book of Blogs of Sustainable Urbanisation

Since 2013, the International Social Science Council (ISSC) has hosted two seminars for early career researchers on the topic of sustainable urbanisation and the transitions to living in urban contexts. There is a wealth of diverse and important social science research being carried out within the ISSC networks and beyond. This project aims to bring our work together quickly in an accessible format to showcase the latest social science research and thinking on sustainable urbanisation.

The project, entitled “Dialogues of sustainable urbanisation: Social science research and transitions to urban contexts” aims to create a book of blogs — which is a collection of short blog posts crowdsourced by, and from, our networks of social scientists working on sustainable urbanisation issues. The book will be self-published as an e-book.

Why a book of blogs?

This contemporary format is enjoying great success. In 2014, the NSMNSS (New Social Media, New Social Science) network published an e-book Social media in social research: Blogs on Blurring the Boundaries curated by Kandy Woodfield. The NSMNSS e-book was inspired by Humane Resourced, a book of blogs from business and human resource professionals curated by David DeSouza in 2013. We aim to replicate the success of these two books to spread the word about sustainable urbanisation within the social sciences.

The idea is to find out about each other, reach new audiences, learn from one another, curate our ideas, and disseminate our research activities. To reflect the blog format, each contribution should be no longer than 1000 words. When added together, we will have a fascinating and diverse collection of contemporary social science work on sustainable urbanisation.

Our aim is for 50 contributors but the more voices the better. You can submit more than one piece and co-authored posts are also welcome. Your post might be a short article previously published elsewhere (subject to copyright of course) or a summary of a recent journal article. It could be a position piece or a personal reflection on an urban context or issue that is important to you. All contributions are welcome! If you are interested in contributing to the ISSC book of blogs, please complete your details here. We will add you to our mail list to update on progress and details for how to submit your work.

Our aim is to publish in Summer 2015 — urbanisation is fast, so are we!

If you have any questions or queries, please contact Dr Jenna Condie, (World Social Science Fellow Sustainable Urbanisation 2014) E: j.m.condie@gmail.com T: @jennacondie

 

FYI:LSE Cities Vacancy: Researcher or Research Officer - New Urban Governance project

Deadline: 17.30, Friday 6 Febrary 2015
 

LSE Cities is seeking a Researcher or Research Officer for its project on New Urban Governance: Urban complexity and institutional capacities of cities. This project is part of LSE Cities’ urban governance research strand and is co-funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The Researcher/Research Officer will report to Dr Nuno Ferreira da Cruz who is coordinating this project. The successful candidate will play an important role in expanding LSE Cities’ research on governing cities and generating internationally-recognized research on urban governance compatible with the LSE’s multi-disciplinary social science environment.

The project’s focus refers to currently emerging governance regimes in cities triggered by a historic conjuncture of the ongoing devolution of decision making powers to cities on the one hand and unprecedented urban challenges on the other. This initiative envisions examining multiple aspects of municipal planning, management, and governance. At its heart is the realisation that cities have to increasingly rely on advanced institutional capacities, democratic governance and effective management to address ever more complex and interrelated economic, social and environmental challenges while tapping into the potential benefits of new technological opportunities.

Candidates for Researcher level will have an MSc in Public Policy/Management, Political Science or a related discipline and substantial research experience relevant to the New Urban Governance project.

Candidates for Research Officer level will have a PhD in Public Policy/Management, Political Science or a related discipline.

Please see the Job Description and Person Specifications for further details, and the job advert on how to apply.

Links:
Job description
Person specification

PhD Fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography

The Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) in Leipzig kindly invites applications from highly qualified and motivated individuals for

1 PhD fellowship

to commence as soon as possible. The IfL is a non-university research institute and member of the Leibniz association with currently around 80 employees. It is institutionally financed by the Free State of Saxony and the Federal Republic of Germany in the context of a common research funding agreement.

The fellowship includes

·            a monthly stipend of 1400 Euro granted for six months

·            access to the academic service infrastructure of the IfL (e.g. the Central Geographical Library, the Geography archives, cartographic and IT services, scientific seminars)

·            individual support in terms of exchange and discussions within the international research network of ira.urban

·            flexible working arrangements in Leipzig

The fellowship will be financed within the framework of the international comparative research project “Urban reconfigurations in post-Soviet space” (ira.urban). The project aims at analysing and explaining continuities and discontinuities in the reconfiguration of urban spaces in the light of traditional, reproduced Soviet and newly formed post-Soviet conditions, as well as of changing global economic and social orders. On the basis of transnational comparative case study research, the project focuses on the question to what extent urban development has become part of a socially negotiated adjustment processes, and a mirror of a comprehensive modernisation process of urban societies in the republics of the former Soviet Union.

We expect that the candidate supports the analyses of current urban systems in post-Soviet countries and regions, as well as relations within the systems, in order to understand how the post-Soviet urban systems are composed.

The research project focuses on the following issues:

-          In what way has a specific post-Soviet operating context emerged during the adaptation of the cities to the conditions of globalisation and internationalisation?

-          To which extent is the post-Soviet space composed by separate/independent urban networks or to which extent has the soviet hierarchical urban system  “survived” and influence the further transnational and national urban space production?

-          What specific and general types of urban development paths could be singled out within post-Soviet space?

Please submit your complete application package in English as one pdf file by e-mail to Yuliana Lazova (y_lazova@ifl-leipzig.de). The deadline for applications is March 7^th  2015.

Please enclose the following documents:

·            CV

·            letter of motivation/statement of purpose, including a short display of the links between your project/idea and ira.urban (2 pages max.)

·            exposé of your PhD project, including your work schedule and work progress   (3-4 pages max, excluding sources)

·            list of your publications and presentations, certificates, references

Should you have any further queries, please contact Isolde Brade (I_Brade@ifl-leipzig.de) or  Irina Slepukhina (I_Slepukhina@ifl-leipzig.de). We are looking forward to your application!

For further information about the project: www.ira-urban.de.

For further information about the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography: www.ifl-leipzig.de.

For further Information about the Leibniz Association: www.leibniz-gemeinschaft.de