Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Interesting conference

Here is the announcement for what promises to be a very interesting conference that provides the opportunity to look at Mumbai from an inter-Asian, global perspective.


CALL FOR PAPERS: SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL, International
Conference on INTER-ASIAN CONNECTIONS DUBAI, UAE, FEBRUARY 21-24, 2008

WORKSHOP TITLE: INTER-REFERENCING ASIA: URBAN EXPERIMENTS & THE ART OF BEING GLOBAL

WORKSHOP DIRECTORS:

Aihwa Ong (
aihwaong@berkeley.edu) and Ananya Roy(ananya@berkeley.edu) University of California, Berkeley

The 21st century will be an urban century and more significant, it will
be a century of Asian urbanization. The growth of Asian cities prompts
the need for a research agenda that pays careful attention to the
processes and forms of urbanism that are forming at such sites. The
analytical framework of "global cities," which is in currency, fails to
capture the role of Asian cities as "worlding" nodes: those that create
global connections and global regimes of value. In particular, it
fails to notice the ways in which Asian cities produce global urbanism
through experiments of inter-referencing whereby urban elites borrow,
copy, and articulate city-making across national borders. In the
dynamic context of such inter-Asian aspirations, Dubai, Singapore, and
Shanghai emerge as "models" while aspiring cities undertake slum
demolitions, invest in premium urban infrastructure, woo investors
through special economic zones, deploy high-style architecture to
create an urban brand, and compete for professionals in the bid to
create world-class economies. Such a production of space has profound
implications for the future of Asian cities: to whom will the city
belong? What will be the relationship between cities and citizenship?

We propose a workshop that focuses on the urban experiment that is the
Asian city. We invite paper proposals that address the following
issues:
1) The "worlding" role of Asian cities in the age of late capitalism
with a particular emphasis on the inter-city borrowings, linkages, and
competitions that drive globalization across Asia. How is such
inter-referencing driven by elite actors, by the state, and by the
circulation of professionals and managers? What are the aesthetic
icons and symbols associated with Asian urban aspirations? In other
words, what is the "art of being global" that is being cultivated at
the site of the Asian city?

2) The types of displacements that are emerging in such Asian cities,
ranging from the flows of labor that service the success and prosperity
of cities to the displacement being engendered by the development of
enclave urbanism. What are the social and political limits of such
displacements? How is the politics of displacement mediated by civil
society actors that operate both within and across particular Asian
cities? What are the forms of urban mobilization that are coalescing
around the modality of displacement?

The sheer political ambition of their urban experimentations suggests a
focus on the United Emirates, India, China, and Southeast Asia, but not
exclusively. We invite scholars from anthropology, urban planning,
architecture, sociology, geography, and cultural studies, as well as
civil society actors, cultural producers, and professionals who are
directly engaged in projects of inter-Asia city-making.
Paper submissions can be focused on a single city or can be comparative
and transnational in nature. Our workshop will foster interactions
that can lead to collaborations, resulting in a new field of
>Inter-Asian Urban Studies. We plan an edited volume that will be the
>first study of this new South-South urban renaissance and the worlding
>ambitions of Asian cities.
>
>SUBMISSION AND CONFERENCE INFORMATION:
>
>Applications are due on Friday, September 14, 2007. They must be
>submitted directly to SSRC. For more information, see
>
http://www.ssrc.org/program_areas/global/papers/.