Description

2021 American Association of Geographers Conference | Seattle

CFP Panel Title: Ungrounding the Urban

Sponsored by the AAG Urban Geography Specialty Group

Paper Session Organizers
Jesse Rodenbiker (Cornell University) and D. Asher Ghertner (Rutgers University)

This session aims to explore new research directions that unground the urban in at least two ways. First, it un-earths the urban, considering it as a more-than-terrestrial domain composed and conditioned by aqueous, gaseous, and volumetric qualities. If urban political ecology draws attention to the social metabolic processes that mutate a range of natural materials into urbanized commodity forms, then we query how the urban as such acquires and retains spatial attributes that drift above, sink below, buzz along, or weave through the earth’s surface. As the multiplying effects of the climate and environmental crises and the uneven geographies of SARS-CoV-2 exposure have made all too evident, the right to the city more than ever must entail the right to aquatic, atmospheric, and subterranean commons. How are urban territorial politics conditioned by uneven access to and distributions in volumetric space? What forms of political and social leakage are associated with the drips, wafts, and seepages of urban material form? The urban’s material drift leads to a second sense of the urban ungrounded. Upon considering the urban as a watershed, airshed, ecological and subterranean and volumetric domain, one is quickly called to unground urban geography from its terrestrial conceptual moorings and to draw upon different traditions of inquiry from agrarian, animal, atmospheric, geological, and marine studies. How might the tools of these “less-than-urban” fields help recalibrate the stakes of and claims to the right to the city? How might they unearth hidden axes of struggle or relations of power and exclusion?

This session will be organized for virtual participation. Please send abstracts that relate to the themes and questions addressed above to rodenbiker@cornell.edu and a.ghertner@rutgers.edu by October 22, 2020.