C*ities A*ction R*esearch E*ducation conference in Vienna, Nov. 2019

I am excited to travel to Vienna by night train to join a conference in Vienna about the “mutually formative relations between cities and care”. The Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning of TU Wien in Austria and the Centre for the Future of Places at KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm in Sweden invite participation in the International Urban Studies Conference on Cities Action Research and Education:

“We aim to discuss ambivalences inherent to care in regard to achieved progresses and ongoing struggles as well as to reflect on the power of caring practices in shaping solidary urban futures. The conference will pursue a more systematic integration of a plurality of empirical, methodological, theoretical and ethical approaches to care in urban studies, and invites different disciplinary perspectives, including social sciences, humanities and the spatial arts.

The goal of the conference is to forward thoughts about care in three themes: (I) socio-spatial (in)equalities and the work of care; (II) struggles and contestations around care and (III) new care arrangements and civic innovation. In all of the three thematic panels the conference explores different notions of care, and thus invites contributions reflecting one or more of the following aspects:

• Lack of Care and Social Inequality: Precarity, Marginalization and the Production of Disadvantage;
• Urban Regimes of Care: (Capitalist) Colonization of Care Relations and Urbanization;
• Care, Labour and Society: Between Individualization, Solidarization and Collectivization;
• Care and the Ordinary: Lived Space, (the Critique of) Everyday Life;
• Geographies of Encounter and Public Space: Affect, Performativity and Care;
• Care Ecologies: Controversies around Urban Scales and Efforts of Scaling Care;
• Care from a Transnational and Trans-local Perspective: Migration, Mobility and Postmigration;
• Ambivalences of Care: Between Careful, Careless and Carefree Cities.”

More info can be found here.