Call for chapters: Politics of Urban Knowledge
BERT DE MUNCK (University of Antwerp) & JENS LACHMUND (Maastricht University)
At
least since early modernity, the worldwide process of urbanization has
been accompanied, and partly shaped by, the formation of the city as a
distinct domain of knowledge.
Cities
provided environments whose dynamics and complexity was unprecedented,
and knowledge making was key when planners, experts and policy makers,
as well as
ordinary inhabitants tried to make sense of its variegated phenomena
and problems.
In the context of the Scientific Research Community (WOG)
‘Urban Agency: The Historical Fabrication of the City as an Object of Study’,
we are planning an edited volume which explores the mutual entanglement of the development and worldwide spread of the city, and the creation and circulation
of knowledge about the city. The
guiding question of the volume will be how contextually contingent
knowledge-making by sciences, professions and civic knowledge agents
have been mutually connected to the ways in which cities and their
physical and social spaces have been produced, governed,
managed, and contested.
Conceptually,
the book seeks to combine historical research with insights from
strands such as governmentality studies, various brands of STS, and
recent discussions on “assemblage
urbanism”. We envision a collection of thematically and geographically
diverse historical case studies (from the Renaissance to the present –
within and beyond the ‘West’) which each focus either on an exemplary
episode in which a new field of urban knowledge
and related politics (governmental practice or contentious action) came
into being, or on how the emergence of a new epistemic practice has
reconfigured the nexus between urban knowledge, space, and politics.
We would be happy to receive any proposal for a chapter that fits with these general goals.
If you want to know more about our ideas for the book, please consult a more extended prospectus
at
https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/
If you consider contribute to the volume, please send an abstract of about 500
words and a short bio to bert.demunck@uantwerpen.be.
Please make sure that we will receive your proposal no later than April 15th
2018. As
intermediate steps we plan a work-in-progress meeting (at the end of
this year), and a final authors’ workshop (based on pre-circulated
drafts) in 2019. Both workshops will take place in Antwerp. For the
contributing authors the traveling and accommodation
costs will be covered.