We are currently accepting submissions for our next event - Infrastructural Times: A Workshop on the Temporalities of Urban-Regional Infrastructure - that will be held at the Regional Studies Association’s Regions in Recovery: Building Sustainable Futures Global e-Festival (online June 2-18, 2021).
The past two decades have witnessed the emergence and maturation of an ‘infrastructure turn’ across a range of disciplines that belies the notion that urban infrastructure is a staid or neutral set of physical artefacts. Infrastructural systems are vital elements that make urban life possible in its myriad forms, yet they are produced and governed over variegated spatial frames and are experienced differently by diverse social groups, often in partial and fragmented ways. The uneven and contested nature of infrastructural spaces means they are always in a state of becoming, and as such, are built upon, and establish new, temporalities. The NOIR Workshop on Infrastructural Times provide a platform for new and original research that critically examines the role of time and temporality in how we study, produce knowledge of, and inform decision-making on urban and regional infrastructure.
The workshop is interdisciplinary in scope, global in focus, and seeks contributions from established, early-career, and graduate student researchers interested in exploring and theorizing our diverse infrastructural times. We welcome conceptual, methodological, and empirical interventions from a variety of disciplinary, geographic, infrastructural, and theoretical perspectives. Relevant themes include, but are not limited to:
Temporal analytical approaches to urban infrastructure
Infrastructural path dependency, lock-in, and crisis
Urban infrastructure and the Anthropocene
The temporal frames of urban vision
Strategies for comparative temporal analysis of urban infrastructure
Infrastructural disruptions (e.g. e-scooters) and their implications for urban governance
The impact (and overlapping) of varied cycles (policy, political, environmental, ecological) on the planning, construction, and maintenance of urban infrastructure systems
Time and the financing of infrastructure (fictitious capital, bonds, assumption of debt)
The role of spatial and temporal imaginaries in (re)shaping our concept of access within urban regions at different times of day and for people of different means
Infrastructure’s material space-times and the production of urban space and lives, from the lifecycles of construction material to the gestation periods of infectious diseases
For more details see the full call for papers.
SUBMISSIONS
Presenters are invited to submit a paper proposal consisting of a title, list of authors, and abstract of up to 300 words to Jean-Paul Addie (jaddie@gsu.edu) by March 1, 2021. We aim to reply to potential presenters within two weeks of this date. Please indicate on your submission if you wish your contribution to be consider for inclusion in a collective publication from the workshop.
CONVENORS
Jean-Paul Addie, Georgia State University | Michael Glass, University of Pittsburgh | Jen Nelles, University of Sheffield