Conference dates: 4-5 December 2019

Deadline for abstracts: 8 September 2019

 

Confirmed keynote speakers: 

Dorothee Brantz

Director of the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universitat Berlin

Anne Rademacher

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Anthropology, New York University

 

Conference description:

In recent years, scholars have increasingly begun to focus on the material politics of urban citizenship, infrastructural service provision, and the formation and transformation of cities more broadly. Adopting a broadly Marxist approach to these questions, for example, many scholars have explored the metabolic processes that connect cities to the landscapes that surround them. Through infrastructural relations and the flow of energy and elements these facilitate, the geographies and ecologies of urban hinterlands have become deeply imbricated with the physical and social tissue of urban sites. The scales of these imbrications vary across both time and space, from local to global, and from acute, disastrous seconds to the geological time of deep history. In the multiple processes of this entanglement, the “urban” and “nature” become entwined to such a degree that the analytical point of dividing the two becomes debatable. The inextricable relationship between “the urban” and “nature” is also fundamentally a political issue, such that the deep entanglement of city and country not only produces its own emergent biotopes, ecologies, and socio-natural phenomenon—something akin to a “third nature”—but also generates new patterns of capital accumulation, political subjectivity, and collective claim-making.

 

If this approach seeks to dissolve the image of the city as a self-contained social and material entity, however, other scholars have explored the material practices of political boundary-marking that bring different scales and units of urban experience into being. Whether the city, the region, the nation, or the planet, the divergent scales and units through which urban problems are framed, solutions are imagined, and services are provided matter greatly for outcomes on the ground. So, too, do the intersection of human and more-than-human forms: migration corridors that intersect with roadways, the habitat geographies that differ from the nature zones laid out by planners, and the watershed topographies that direct flows across boundaries of property and administration. The interplay of these scales and units generates both challenges and opportunities for urban governance, gives concrete shape to city life, and constitutes an important point of leverage for contemporary social and political project

 

For detailed information, see the CFP on the CEH website.

Questions about the event can also be emailed to CEH: ceh@cas.au.dk

 

Co-organized by:

Ecological Globalizations Research Group https://projects.au.dk/ecoglobal/

Urban Orders Research Center  http://uro.au.dk 

Center for Environmental Humanities  http://ceh.au.dk/

Danish Center for Urban History  http://byhistorie.dk

Primary organizers: 

Mikkel Thelle, Associate Professor, History hismf@cas.au.dk

Michael Vine, Postdoctoral Researcher, Ecological Globalizations project

Mikkel Høghøj, Postdoctoral Researcher, Entangled Fluid Cities Project