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Urban crisis has long been an object of inquiry within urban geography. Scholars have sought to understand the role of crisis in capital accumulation and the spatiality of the built environment (Harvey 1989, Jessop 2012), crisis as event and the ways that it shapes spaces and politics (Agamben 2005), and crisis as an ongoing, ever-present condition (Harris and Nowicki, 2018). Contemporary ‘urban crisis’ is generally understood to fall into three areas: economic, ecological, andsocial (Bayırbağ et al 2017, Harvey 1989, Mayer 2020, Tonkiss 2017). However, this obscures how urban crises are also formulated on other political, social, andcultural axes. For example, crises of public health, such as the Covid-19 pandemic or the opioid overdose crisis, are often neglected within these discussions, despite having profound effects on cities and urban life, and uniquely tying together multi-sector decision making processes (Brown 2009, Temenos 2019).

Crises are often seen as opportunities to challenge the status quo: what is revealed in crisis holds a grain of possibility, even, for dismantling capitalist and colonial structures (Rivera Cusicanqui 2016) and making way for new futures to emerge from present contradictions (McNelly 2022, Zavaleta 2006). Enrolling cities as sites of experimentation is thus an attempt at solving the crisis at hand and either preventing or encouraging wider social change. It is in this urban space where systemic crises merge with mundane aspects of specific crises, enabling experimentation with new solutions to perceived and actual failures: failures of the economy, the environment, the social, or the biopolitical. For example, the emergence of community health clinics in Athens in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. Conceptualizing the spatial aspects of crisis can provide insights into the political and material conditions for crisis recovery in cities. Demonstrated in Hall et al’s (1978) Policing the Crisis, which used the lens of racialized policing to explore the Gramscian assertion of crisis as a space where the old system is dying and the new struggles to be born, it is also evident in Berlant’s (2011) focus on the crisis-ordinary whereby the socially reproductive capacities of communities andindividuals are blunted or cut off through the slow violence of ongoing everyday crises (Linz 2021).

This session seeks to spatialize urban crisis at the juncture between the structural and the everyday. We are interested in papers that engage spatialities of intersecting urban crises to ask:
What is the relationship between crisis as event and crisis as everyday condition?
What processes emerge and shift during times of urban crisis?
What dynamics emerge in crisis that open or close possibilities for justice?
What politics, processes, and tools are employed during times of crisis and how do the applications of different political strategies engender subsequent crises or indeed work to overcome them?
How are crises played out differently across cities in the Global North, Global South or Global East?
What can emergent thinking from abolitionist, de-, and anti-colonial scholarship bring to theorizing the spatialities of crisis?
What is the relationship between time, scale, and crisis?
How does narrative of crisis emerge, and how do different experiences of crisis occurring simultaneously influence the narration of crisis? Who gets to name a crisis and how?
What are the becomings of crisis as crisis conditions extend, compound upon one another, cascade, or when a situation becomes a “permanent crisis” (Beckett, 2019)?
How are crisis and recovery related?
What does recovery and being beyond recovery mean for cities and urban life?
Recovery implies an impetus to return to a former state. Is such a return desirable, or how might intersecting urban crises act as more of a portal (Roy, 2020) to birth new forms of governance, develop political praxis, and shift how cities are lived in and experienced?


References

Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception. Nova srpska politička misao, 12(01+ 04), 135-145.

Aguiluz, M., & de los Ríos, N. (2006). René Zavaleta Mercado: Ensayos, testimonios y re-visiones. Miño y Dávila.

Bayırbağ, M. K., Davies, J. S., & Muench, S. (2017). Interrogating urban crisis: Cities in the governance and contestation of austerity. Urban Studies, 54(9), 2023-2038.

Beckett, G. (2019). There is no more Haiti: between life and death in Port-au-Prince. University of California Press.

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.

Brown, M. (2009). 2008 Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Public Health as Urban Politics, Urban Geography: Venereal Biopower in Seattle, 1943-1983. Urban Geography, 30(1), 1-29.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clark, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Vol. 29). The MacMillan Press

Harris, Ella, & Nowicki, Mel. (2018). Cultural geographies of precarity. Cultural Geographies, 25(3), 387–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474018762812

Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography,71(1), 3-17.

Jessop, B. (2012). Narratives of crisis and crisis response: Perspectives from North and South. In The global crisis and transformative social change (pp. 23-42). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Linz, J. (2021). Where crises converge: the affective register of displacement in Mexico City’s post-earthquake gentrification. cultural geographies, 28(2), 285-300.

McNelly, A. (2022). Harnessing the Storm: Searching for Constitutive Moments and a Politics of Ch’ixi after the Pink Tide. Alternautas, 9(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.31273/an.v9i1.1157

Mayer, M. (2020). What does it mean to be a (radical) urban scholar-activist, or activist scholar, today?.City,24(1-2), 35-51.

Rivera Cusicanqui, S. (2016). Un mundo ch’ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Tinta Limón.

Roy, Arundhati. (April 3, 2020). The pandemic is a portal.Financial Times. Retrieved March 17, 2022, from https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

Temenos, C (2019).Troubling Austerity: Crisis policy-making and revanchist public health politics. ACME Keynote for RGS-IBG London, UK. (Forthcoming ACME).

Tonkiss, F. (2013). Austerity urbanism and the makeshift city. City, 17(3), 312-324.

Non-Presenting Participants