CfP: CIG2021 - 'Sustainable City Futures: COVID & Beyond'

[Jane Feeney]

Dear all, 

Please see below our call for papers for the themed session ‘Sustainable City Futures: COVID & Beyond’ at the upcoming Conference of Irish Geographers 2021, 18-21st May (online).

Sustainable City Futures: COVID & Beyond

Organisers: Monika Rut, Louise Fitzgerald, Jane Feeney, Trinity College Dublin

The outbreak of COVID-19 has raised critical questions to be asked about functionalities of urban infrastructures as well as imaginative concerns. For example, how we can transform the imaginary of responding ‘in the meantime’ (Clocke et al., 2015) into one that centres care as a critical element of ‘building forward better’. In fact, in the context of the infrastructural instability experienced in cities during the pandemic outbreak, diverse urban engagements with care practices, spaces and cultures became increasingly manifested through everyday acts of repair and maintenance (Graham and Thrift, 2007) - both as ‘politics in common’ to nurture collective urban awareness and actions as well as radical new forms of urban renewal and solidarity for re-imagining sustainable and just city futures.

The COVID pandemic has been perceived as a crossroads, a chance to accelerate climate mitigation, or to deal with long embedded social inequalities that have been further revealed and deepened by the crisis. At the same time, the pandemic itself has witnessed a proliferation of grassroots decentralised acts of mutual aid (Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar, 2020) which show signs of more caring cultures many hope will define our futures. We understand these calls for transformation and emergent caring infrastructures to be a chance to reflect more critically on future urban imaginaries.

We invite empirical, conceptual and theoretical contributions exploring sustainable cities in a post-COVID future, which may include (but are not restricted to) the following themes:

• Critical urban future imaginaries
• Critical urban infrastructures
• Urban cultures of care
• Urban political ecology implications of Just Recovery, Build Back Better, Green New Deal and other emerging future-orientated policy programmes.

Cloke, P., May, J., & Williams, A. (2017). The geographies of food banks in the meantime.Progress in Human Geography, 41(6), 703-726.
Graham, S., & Thrift, N. (2007). Out of order: Understanding repair and maintenance. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(3), 1-25.
Sitrin, M., & Sembrar, C. (Eds.). (2020). Pandemic solidarity: Mutual aid during the COVID-19 crisis. Pluto Press.

Please submit your paper title and a 250-word abstract to shar...@tcd.ie by 23rd April 2021.

Link to conference and sessions: https://www.conferenceofirishgeographers.ie/themed-sessions 

[Richard Rosen]

Why haven't you mentioned the medical/health care professionals in your email?  They need to be involved in creating more sustainable healthcare for all.  But generally they play a very conservative role in defending the existing healthcare system...--- Rich Rosen

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