Gridding Equitable Urban Futures in Areas of Transition

• In what ways should we rethink the relationship between socio-technical transitions and the making of more equitable urban futures? 

• What capacities, requirements and imaginaries do communities have in contexts of informality; contexts that are often perceived as marginal, precarious, and incomplete? 

• How should we contextualise policies bent on targets, notably decarbonising and net zero energy, so that the knowledge, creativity, resilience, and regenerative resourcefulness of citizens are integrated into visions of just, equitable futures for the specific places which they call their home?
  
  

Join us in Lancaster in 2023 for this interdisciplinary conference
to explore critically and creatively these and related questions.

Critiques of technocratic approaches pervade much thinking and practice concerning transitions, sustainability, and development. These have shown the limitations of a range of instruments, from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda (Escobar 1995, 2018, Kaika 2017) through to the many and varied ‘smart’ solutions, concepts and indicators meant to chart the paths along which communities can become more sustainable, more resilient, and more adaptable to uncertain future conditions (Visvanathan 1991, Köhler et al 2019, Jirón et al 2021, Raven 2022).

The making of equitable urban futures with and by communities is intertwined with questions that are at once political, environmental, socio-economic, and cultural. These questions, in turn, include significant challenges concerning ethnicity, gender, class, age, the presence of violence, and the barriers that these pose to voice and representation. We invite contributions that engage with these questions and barriers in areas of transition, namely, areas undergoing change from one condition to another whether it involves: changes to particular ways of life; shifts in the use of technology; shifts in understandings of political regimes, local and national economies; the transformation of institutions related to, for example, transitional justice following periods of armed conflict, violence, and war; the transformation of legal frameworks and practices concerning the legacy of extractive industries; urban transitions and transformations research as defined by Torrens et al (2021); and more. The conference seeks to foster a debate about the various ways and means of ‘gridding’ equitable urban futures. Focusing on the verb ‘grid’ allows us to recognise, map, and develop the strong human ‘infrastructures of relational practices’ that are central to the making of futures (Simone 2015, 2004, Amin and Thrift 2017, Escobar 2018). 

How people ‘grid’ together social relations intersects with efforts that counter technical fixes designed with little concern for how they might be used by residents of, for example, informal settlements or popular neighbourhoods (via subsidies, or the direct provision of basic infrastructure). We wish to explore the multiple ways in which gridding practices come together, clash, and complement each other; and to learn from contributions that tell us about the politics, challenges and opportunities of gridding in particular places and times. We are interested in sharing experiences of generating critical participatory co-design processes which are integrative, holistic and seek to become sustainable in future.

As keystone contributions, the conference draws from and will include reports by members of the UKRI-GCRF project Gridding Equitable Urban Futures in Areas of Transition in Cali, Colombia and Havana, Cuba – GREAT, which brings together Lancaster University, University College London, Universidad del Valle in Cali and the Technological University of Havana “José Antonio Echavarría” CUJAE.

We welcome diverse contributions by policymakers and civic leaders, practitioners, activists, artists, and academics at all stages in their careers, who take communities and the social as their starting point to show how equitable urban and other futures can be conceptualised and acted upon. In particular, we want to discuss how exactly and under which conditions futures can become more equitable in relation to a range of specific challenges, including:

• Land use, ownership and titling

• Accessibility and equity in informal settlements or popular neighbourhoods

• Evaluating transportation equity

• Municipal solid waste management, circular economy, and zero waste experiences

• Infrastructures of care

• Relationships between on-grid and off-grid communities

• Intersectionality and the upgrading of informal settlements or popular neighbourhoods

• The role of gender, class, ethnicity, age in ‘gridding’ equitable urban futures

• Community data and technological infrastructures

• Methodological approaches to intersectional research and design for transitions

• The role of the arts in opening up different imaginaries of change

Submission

The conference welcomes panel proposals, full papers, posters, provocations, and art submissions. Abstracts (c.300 words, excluding references, for individual papers; panels should include c.300 words per paper) should be sent in Spanish or English to great_offgrid@lancaster.ac.uk

Key dates

Open call: November 23rd 2022

Abstract submission deadline: May 19th 2023 (Extended)