Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting 2013, Los Angeles April 9-13th
Session Title: Port Cityscapes: Dynamic Perspectives on the Port-City-Waterfront Interface Ports, waterfronts, and their cities remain closely interconnected, despite the structural changes in global trade, shipping and logistics which have transformed their spatial and functional-economic relationships. Scholars have approached specific elements of this complex interface from selected disciplinary perspectives. Transport and economic geographers have focused on the position of ports in spatially extensive supply chains and global production networks as well as the regionalization of the port system and of logistics activity, and port governance reform. Architectural and planning practitioners as well as urban historians, have focused on waterfront transformation as the frontline of urban regeneration and as part of the shift to a post-industrial economy. Social and urban geographers have focused on the redevelopment of waterfronts for high end uses/users as well as the displacement of the urban working class. As a result, port cities are now studied and transformed by different (disciplinary) perspectives and often unconnected actors and stakeholders, even though the long-standing functional and spatial relation between port and city now understood to include the larger metropolitan area continues. This session invites papers on port cities which critically assess the fraught but dynamic relationships that exist between ports, waterfronts, and urban development. We invite scholars from various academic backgrounds to reflect on current theoretical developments in their specific fields, to discuss theoretical and methodological approaches as well as the inherent conceptual implications in interdisciplinary research on port cities, and to critically assess emerging port cityscapes through a range of global case studies. We specifically ask: - How can current theoretical developments in diverse areas including economic geography, planning, urban studies, urban governance, urban sociology, urban politics, political ecology, socio-nature, mobility and migration studies, labor geographies, urban/place- branding or image-creation, sustainability, or resilience studies speak to an interdisciplinary investigation of port-waterfront-city development? - How could such interdisciplinary approaches work concretely in terms of research methodologies (qualitative, quantitative, mixed) and scales (macro, meso, micro)? What are appropriate unit(s) of analysis and what data do we need? - What is the interrelatedness of port transformation, infrastructural change and change at the city-regional scale? - What empirical tools are available to examine to explore the concrete intersection of global/local and socio-economic/material-physical structures through the lens of port-cities? Submissions: Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by Friday 21st September 2012 by email to any of the session organizers: Wouter Jacobs, Utrecht University, Netherlands: w.a.a.jac...@uu.nl Carola Hein, Bryn Mawr College, USA: ch...@brynmawr.edu Anne Wiese, Munich Technical University, Germany: langer-wi...@tum.de Peter V. Hall, Simon Fraser University, Canada: pvh...@sfu.ca Successful submissions will be contacted by 1st October 2012 and will be expected to register and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by October 24th 2012.
