Call For Abstracts: 2012 AAG Annual Meeting, New York, February 24th-28th
Session Title: Contemporary North American Suburbanisms: Concepts and
Metrics.
Organizer: Pablo Mendez (University of British Columbia) and Markus Moos
(University of Waterloo)
If the "Leave it to Beaver" suburb was ever an accurate representation
of archetypal post-war suburbanism in North America, it is clear today
that this notion can no longer hold. The expansion of post-Fordist,
neoliberal urbanism and the important transformations in household
arrangements and gender relations since at least the 1970s have
challenged us to re-think our interpretations of metropolitan social
space and recognize heterogeneity where homogeneity was once assumed.
Spatial and systemic inequalities associated with economic
globalization, changing international and domestic migration patterns,
and rampant gentrification in many cities are similarly forcing us to
re-examine contemporary processes in the suburbs and our ways of mapping
their development, consequences, and overall significance. Are we in
need of new or re-worked concepts, research methods, and quantitative
indicators to track and understand these socio-economic and spatial
changes?
We invite papers for a session that explores questions such as:
- What has changed about North American suburbs over the past two or
three decades?
- How do these transformations make us rethink, in both social and
geographic terms, what these places that we have come to call "suburbs"
actually are?
- How are socially marginalized groups affected by such changes?
- How are various forms of inequality shaping processes in contemporary
suburbia?
- How do differences between new and mature/inner suburbs map out
against various forms of socio-spatial inequality?
- What concepts, methods, and metrics can help us make sense of
contemporary suburbanisms in the North American context?
Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to Pablo Mendez,
[email protected] , by September 23.
