INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTT

FROM CONTESTED_CITIES TO GLOBAL URBAN JUSTICE

CRITICAL DIALOGUES
The CONTESTED_CITIES conference is a forum of
radical academics, practitioners and activists
from different theoretical, disciplinary and geographical backgrounds to probe the multiple
forms of urban injustice that shape cities across
the world. Cities have always been contested
spaces where actors in asymmetric power relations engage in struggles over different political
visions of urban development, planning and life.
Yet we now appear heading towards a global
convergence of urban contestation. Millions of
urban citizens are experiencing dispossession,
displacement and expulsion on a daily basis;
their right to the city has been denied by diverse forms of neoliberal and authoritarian urban governance. At the same time, there is a
global outpouring of resistance and counterstrategies to these injustices that operate at different scales and through a variety of forms and
approaches. The conference will further develop
dialogues and perspectives to fight against these
injustices, and explore the powerful narratives
that will guide us in creating alternative practice
which goes beyond neoliberalism.
Madrid is an exceptional venue for this conference. At the centre of the 15-M movement
whose many urban and anti-capitalist demands
shook the obsolete Spanish party-political system, the city has become a laboratory of contestation. New urban initiatives challenge the established order, providing radical insights into alternative practices of everyday life. The conference
will hear from first-hand experiences of this and
other struggles for urban justice where activists
and social movement actors are now putting
their ideas practice their ideas into practice..
Conference dates: 4-7 July 2016
Main languages: Spanish and English

CONTESTED_CITIES is a network of researchers

from Europe and Latin America that have been
working together since 2012 to research and
analyse processes of neoliberalisation of space,
gentrification and social contestation. At this
conference we will present our findings and
open up a dialogue with colleagues, practitioners
and activists from across all continents. The conference will be structured around the following
five streams:
1. CONCEPTS FOR CRITICAL URBANISMS BEYOND THE
NEW GLOBAL URBAN QUESTION

2. THE GLOBAL URBAN HOUSING QUESTION

3. THE NEW EXPULSION ORDER SHEDDING LIGHT ON
THE VIOLENCE OF DISPLACEMENT

4. NEW FORMS AND LIMITS OF GENTRIFICATION

5. THE NEW URBAN ALTERNATIVES RECLAIMING AND
PRACTICING SOCIAL AND SPATIAL JUSTICE

Key dates for the CONTESTED_CITIES conference:

Abstract reception:
November 15thto December 31st, 2015
Letters of acceptance:
January 31st, 2016
Early-bird inscription:
February 1stto March 31st, 2016
Regular inscription:
April 1st to May 31st, 2016
Full-text submission:
April 1st to May 31st, 2016
Publication of the conference programme:
June 20th, 2016
Info: http://www.contested-cities.net
Contact: ccc2016@contested-cities.net

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTT

FROM CONTESTED_CITIES TO GLOBAL URBAN JUSTICE

CRITICAL DIALOGUES
STREAM 1T

CONCEPTS FORCRITICAL URBANISMS BEYOND THE NEW GLOBAL URBAN QUESTION

Cities across the globe have always been contested spaces where actors in asymmetric
power relations engage in struggles over different visions of urban development, planning
and life. They have been profoundly shaped by class antagonism, social and spatial injustice
and multiple policies targeting the dispossession of the poor, in recent years manifested
through austerity urbanism, crisis policies and processes of financialisation.
Contemporary academic debates have posed the question of how urban conditions are
profoundly interconnected with global processes and vice versa. With regard to the literature on the variegation of neoliberal urbanism, the intensity of policy mobilities and the
discussion about comparativist approaches within global urban studies, different notions
and actions which express planetary power relations have been identified. However, deeper theoretical understandings are needed in global urban studies, giving more prominent
voices to post-colonialist approaches that manage to effectively politicise some of the recent debates about the comparativist gesture, policy mobility, assemblage urbanism and
other prominent concepts.
As new forms of contestation have emerged, we are seeking novel theoretical discussions
that reflect the societal shift away from neoliberal inspirations and experiments. Urban
grassroots have offered alternative modes for everyday realities, establishing contested
spaces in cities, and contest cities in the territory of Europe, Latin America and beyond. Yet
academic discussions do not entirely reflect the historical ruptures that have been taking
place in the very heart of our cities, and we need a new conceptual vocabulary to effectively express radical approaches to the new global urban question. Theorisations about social
and spatial injustice, the right to the city, and dispossession might only be a starting point
for the debate that we are seeking to develop in this stream.
Contributions should focus around one or several of these questions:
1) How can we politicise critical urbanisms beyond the critique of neoliberalism, policy
mobility, and the development of actually post-colonialist urban studies?
2) Which theoretical debates are better adept to further theorise processes of social and
spatial injustice in the contemporary city?
3) How can theoretical discussions be incorporated in practical debates and provide
meaningful knowledge for urban struggles and transformations?

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTT

FROM CONTESTED_CITIES TO GLOBAL URBAN JUSTICE

CRITICAL DIALOGUES
STREAM 2T

THE GLOBAL URBAN HOUSING QUESTION

ACTORS, EXPERIENCES AND STRUGGLES ACROSS SPACE AND TIME
For many across the world, housing is an unfulfilled human right. Under capitalism, the right to
housing has been turned into a real estate asset. The use value of housing has been undermined by increasing exchange values, while homeownership and property rights are secured
under legislative frameworks which emphasise the freedom to own and invest. Contemporary
housing production and re-production is related to processes of financialisation, privatisation
of public housing, securitization of private housing and the increasing importance of transnational investors and global landlords in local housing markets. Housing policies are designed to
encourage capital circulation in the built environment, enforcing various forms of deprivation,
exclusion and urban enclosure. The state in many cases has facilitated this process of dispossession and in other cases has tried to provide patchy solutions to the growing housing issue.
At the receiving end, urban dwellers experience precarious housing conditions but also organise themselves to denounce the injustices and find alternative solutions to housing-for-profit.
We encourage paper proposals tackling with the housing question across space and time by
addressing one or several of the following questions:
1) Which is the main driver and expression of the many housing crises and what can we learn
out of the current condition?
2) What is the relation between housing policies, housing markets and the right to housing?
Which is the rationale behind current housing policies and how can it be challenged?
3) What processes of transnationalisation and financialisation of housing markets are taking
place in different local contexts, what are their impacts, and who are global landlords and
how do they act? Can we derive any lessons on housing dispossession?
4) Which contemporary housing movements have emerged, and what are their demands on
housing? Who is engaging in housing movements and how are neoliberal policies being
challenged? What is the alternative right to housing that arises out of collective action?

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTT

FROM CONTESTED_CITIES TO GLOBAL URBAN JUSTICE

CRITICAL DIALOGUES
STREAM 3T

THE NEW EXPULSION ORDER SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE VIOLENCE OF DISPLACEMENT

Displacement is a notion which characterises the deep transformations in contemporary

cities, highlighting the existence of socio-spatial injustice. Urban policies in constant search
of rent gaps, promote gentrification, dispossession and social control, and provide increasing evidence of the impact of displacement. It is necessary to deconstruct, specify, politicise
and relate processes of dispossession with the concept of displacement, in the sense of
expulsion and forced removal of divergent subjectivities, driving discourses beyond housing
and gentrification.
This stream will debate processes of urban displacement that take place in cities. Massive
displacement through mega urban developments is ongoing in cities of Brazil, India and
China, large-scale housing evictions are occurring across Southern Europe, while housing
prices and transnational investment in London and Berlin are expelling the poor. We are
interested in bringing together critical urban theories and insight into political conflict, migration, mobility, and the anthropology of violence, to try to understand and challenge
these injustices.
In this stream we encourage debates which link theoretical assumptions to empirical evidence of urban displacement by engaging with the following questions:
1) Which policies and discourses promote and naturalise displacement?
2) What we can learn from local case studies that address processes of displacement via
accumulation by dispossession?
3) How is displacement accomplished in different places? What new means of displacement can be identified?
4) What are the emerging means of social control and violence in public and private
space? How can displacement be conceived as another instrument of social and spatial
control?
5) How can the mainstream discourses, which legitimise processes and practices of aggression and deprivation, be challenged and reversed?

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTT

FROM CONTESTED_CITIES TO GLOBAL URBAN JUSTICE

CRITICAL DIALOGUES

STREAM 4T

NEW FORMS AND LIMITS OF GENTRIFICATION

Gentrification is now an established academic concept, and has penetrated activist and
policy debates in most corners of the world. As a result we have now accumulated a great
deal of knowledge about its manifestation, particularly in large cities and especially with
regard to housing. But gentrification is not only related to the expulsion of deprived and
unwanted social groups from local housing markets. Urban restructuring in peri-urban areas, new-build and brownfield developments sheds light on the way the process variously
transforms urban landscapes. And retail gentrification, a rising phenomenon, is transforming the commercial landscape of our cities, with the domination of international retail giants, the selective penetration of boutiques and high end independent shops and the redevelopment of markets, displacing traditional businesses and low income shoppers. The
change of use values into exchange values, the displacement of the previous agents, the
eradication of everyday rhythms and the imposition of new lifestyles and cityscapes dictated by capital, the state and real estate markets become mode of gentrification. The variegated geographies of gentrification underlie new forms of vengeful urbanism where the
enforcement of the new urban order is achieved by socio-spatial cleansing and displacement.
Deconstructing the current transformations of gentrification may fortify anti-gentrification
anti-displacement struggles with new arguments and tools. In this stream we encourage
discussion over the new forms, practices and spaces of gentrification, by focusing on the
following questions:
1) Which are the new spaces of gentrification, and at which scale? What is the new global
urban order imposed in todays cities by gentrification?
2) What new forms of gentrification have emerged? How is space being re-invented in
the current era?
3) Which new (affective, symbolic, resistant) practices foster or challenge gentrification?
4) How can we halt processes of gentrification? What can we learn from activists and
grassroots movements about the building of a more just city?

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTT

FROM CONTESTED_CITIES TO GLOBAL URBAN JUSTICE

CRITICAL DIALOGUES

STREAM 5T

THE NEW URBAN ALTERNATIVES

RECLAIMING AND PRACTICING SOCIAL AND SPATIAL JUSTICE

Cities are contested spaces where actors in asymmetric power relations struggle over different conceptions of urban development, justice, planning and politics. The enforcement
of austerity urbanism has led to deprivation of many social and spatial rights, depriving
people increasingly of their right to the city. By overtly rejecting the neoliberal rationale,
grassroots movements aim to re-establish direct democracy and launch new approaches to
commoning, social solidarity and alternative values that may crack capitalism in its contemporary condition. In many cities of Latin America, and currently in Spain, social movements have become key actors for and in local governments, producing ruptures with the
neoliberal regime. Nonetheless, the interaction with power structures may create obstacles to, or even foreclose, new urban alternatives.
Seeking to shed light on the current urban processes and the dynamics of radical urban
transformations, this stream invites papers on socio-spatial justice and the new urban alternatives which address the following questions:
1) What does the right to the city, as well as social and spatial justice mean in different
socio-economic and political contexts?
2) Which policies are challenged by new relationships between social movements and
governments, and how does this happen?
3) What new roles for social movements have emerged, especially in their relation to local, regional and central governments?
4) Which new forms of urbanity, social and spatial relationships are constructed by anticapitalist movements and alternative practices in cities?
5) What potential is there for establishing radical urban geographies, and which conceptual bases are needed to construct new programmes of action and research that effectively transform urban life and thus go beyond the mainstream academic discourse?

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTT

FROM CONTESTED_CITIES TO GLOBAL URBAN JUSTICE

CRITICAL DIALOGUES

ORGANISATION &LOGISTICST

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
Abstracts should be submitted in Spanish or English summarising the objectives of the paper, the theoretical discourse, methodology, analysis and findings. Abstracts must be between 800 to 1,200 words, and followed by five keywords which support the paper proposal.

SUBMISSION DEADLINES
Abstracts should be submitted by Thursday, December 31st, 2015.
Submission is only possible online at: http://www.congreso.contested-cities.net
Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be send on Monday, February1st, 2016.
Presenters are expected to submit their full papers by Tuesday, May 31st, 2016. Word limit for
the submitted(full) papers is from 4.000 to 10.000 words (min 4.000- max 10.000 words) including references.
The submitted papers will be published in a Special Issue of the CONTESTED_CITIES Working Paper Series (ISSN 2341- 2755): http://contested-cities.net/working-papers/
After the conference, selected papers will be considered for contribution to edited volumes and
thematic issues in specialised journals (of high IF).

REGISTRATION AND FEES

Registration opens on February 1st 2016. Registration and the payment of the corresponding participation fees are mandatory prior to the submission of full papers for all participants who wish to attend the conference. In case of multi-authorship, co-authors should
subscribe to the conference only if they wish to participate. The closing date for registration of presenters is May 31st 2016. Reduced fees are available until Thursday March 31st
2016. Fees include vouchers for lunch during the four conference days.
Early Birds

Late Birds

(payment within
st
March 31 , 2016)

(payment after
st
March 31 , 2016)

185,-
120,-
75,-
45,-

240,-
150,-
95,-
50,-

Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4

INFORMATION:
http://www.congreso.contested-cities.net

E-MAIL:
ccc2016@contested_cities.net

Group 1: Established academics (tenured researchers, postdoctoral researchers

with contract)
Group 2: Early-stageresearchers from Europe,
North America and other highincome countries (PhD students&post-docs without a full-time
equivalent contract or scholarship)
Group 3: Early-stage researchers from Southern Europe, Latin America, Africa
and Asia
Group 4: Conference attendants without
presentation and unemployed earlystage researchers(certification provided, no lunch vouchers)