RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2010, 1st-3rd September, London UK A Joint Sponsored Session of the Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG) and the Planning and Environmental Research Group (PERG)

Convenors

Susan Moore (Bartlett School of Planning, University College London), This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Andrew Harris (Department of Geography, University College London), This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Abstract

This session aims to explore how urban planning techniques, strategies and ideologies develop, travel, translate and diffuse. It will draw on recent work on the mobility and assemblage of urban policies and policy-making, while responding to a new emphasis on globalized 'planning cultures' (Friedmann, 2005) within planning theory. Whilst broadly focused on the concept of 'planning terrains' and the cultural and theoretical implications of urban 'policies on the move' (McCann and Ward 2009), the session seeks to challenge a reliance on idealised models of 'good cities' that do not sufficiently account for the geographical and historical specificity of urban places. In so doing, the session also aims to complement and extend existing debates surrounding the 'post-colonialization' of urban theory (Robinson, 2006) and a refocusing of planning practice beyond dominant European and North American models (Watson, 2009).

Contributors will be encouraged to address the following questions and themes:

a. How are urban planning agendas and spatial typologies devised, promoted, negotiated and circulated through particular types of globalised networks?

b. What transfer agents, institutional interfaces, translation methods and embodied practices are involved? What models, visual devices and templates for learning are created and recruited?

c. How do models of urban planning account for and anticipate the geographical and historical specificity of places?

d. What is the relationship between historical and contemporary terrains of global planning practice and education?

e. How are global and regional urban planning and policy networks being diversified and re-orientated? What is the role for new information and communication technologies?

f. How it is possible to decentre and unsettle dominant narratives and practices of urban planning, particularly through perspectives and experiences from the global South?

Please submit abstracts (of no more than 250 words) to both convenors by Friday 12th February 2010.