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This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

This session will mobilise theoretical reflections as well as empirical developments to examine and reimagine contemporary urban studies and policy debates, taking in full account the agency of global mobilities on processes of space production. The ‘mobilities turn’ has reinvigorated the social sciences across disciplinary frontiers towards an approach to the study of space and place that is cognizant of the multiple, heterogeneous flows intervening in and contending locality. The works of authors such as Tim Cresswell and Peter Adey represent key advances towards putting this theoretical body at use in planning practice and policy. In fact, im|mobilities nuance a highly political ontology of dwelling the city: unevenly distributed, enacted (materially and cognitively) on multiple scales, ordering (in) place and assembling in landscapes where privilege and power become relationally enmeshed with exclusion and despair. Concepts such as constituency and urban populations are challenged in an era in which growing contingents of urban dwellers are disenfranchised by stable residency, workplace, and the rights generally attributed to that; and become an object of controversy, as ‘faster’ dwellers demonstrate to have differential power over place, inevitably unsettling the position of less motile communities.

While the production and constitution of space under the assumption of the growing power of non-local city users has been central in new approaches in urban studies, for instance in the works of Guido Martinotti, Nigel Thrift or Edward Soja, we still lack a consistent affirmation of urbanism as praxis, based on a novel understanding of resilience, social mobility, social rights, and democratic participation, that takes fully in and harnesses the liquid political geography of the contemporary urban. This is exemplified by the rising tourism dimension of cities, of all sizes and genealogies. Tourism is hardly a transversal matter of concern for urban planning and policy, but rather relegated in (generally pro-growth) sectorial policy domains and planning. Cities make and regulate space for the tourism industry, yet visitors, such as temporary non-resident and non-working populations, that tend to favour tourist destinations as sites of access and activity, remain invisible, unaccountable subjects in formal policy, in spite of their recognised capacity to ‘make place’ – as it is widely demonstrated in the case of privileged elite migrants, digital nomads, international and non-resident students, but also undocumented and underprivileged migrant workers. This lopsided relation between structure and subject eventually determines an incapacity of cities to come to ends with the multiple exclusions that are reproduced in the tourist place, in domains such as labour, housing, transit, access to services, health, etc.

This debate ties into revisions of the concepts of urban resilience, with a strong social and normative connotation – which social interests should urban planning and policy defend, which social ecologies need becoming the object of government action, if an increasing share of urban dwellers falls under the radar of conventional constituency?

The second part of this session is dedicated to methods innovation and new evidence informing practice in resilience planning.

The organisation of the session falls under the banner of three research projects: 1) the EU Horizon2020 project SMARTDEST - Cities as mobility hubs: tackling social exclusion through ‘smart’ citizen engagement; the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities-funded project ADAPTOUR: 2) The Adaptability of Complex Tourist Destinations in the Present Era of Social, Economic and Environmental Transformations: Innovative Paths Towards Destination Resilience; and 3) VISITMOB – Visitors' mobility in the city of Barcelona after Covid19: analysis and guidelines for the promotion of socially and environmentally sustainable mobility, funded by the City Council of Barcelona and LaCaixa Foundation within the framework of the Barcelona Science Plan 2020-2023. All three projects are led by the GRATET Research Group of Rovira i Virgili University.

This session is sponsored by the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change.

Non-Presenting Participants