T01 City in movement: Participation, activism and identity

Social movements, associations and informal groups, among other social networks and participating structures, are central protagonists of the city. Particularly significant is their active role as builders of an alternative, dissentious city, characterised by dynamics of conflict, power and negotiation of urban space. These movements are also marked by their strong identity dimension, building themselves, and the city, through dissentious events, activists’ networks and circuits and resistance hidden spots.

What recent developments are occurring at this level, in a time of new themes and forms of collective action? What is the social and identity impact resulting from participation in these movements? How can we articulate the local urban intervention scale with transnational movements and virtual networks of activism? And how do these movements contribute, too, to the political, symbolic and spatial construction of the city, as one more piece of the large urban kaleidoscope?

Directors

• Nuno Nunes, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIES-IUL
• Inês Pereira, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIES-IUL

Open Submissions

Peer Reviewed

T02 City and Culture in Action: Politics, Practices and Cultural Identities

Formal and informal urban cultural dynamics weave a complex web of identities and social ties. Not only do urban cultural dynamics mediate between different social groups, universes of meaning and conflict situations, they also generate alternative spaces of transgression and civic intervention, assuming an increasingly significant role in the cities’ economy. These processes are developed on several scales: local, national and transnational. Urban cultures are also the breeding ground for new identity movements (more or less dissentious), turning cities into the prime spaces for diversity and cultural effervescence.

How can we analyse the relationship between lifestyles, identities and new forms of urban culture? What identity negotiation strategies mediate the level of practices and the level of policies in the urban context? How can we think about the relationship between the cultural sphere and the fields of economy and politics nowadays? To what extent are variables such as class, ethnicity, gender, age, territorial origin, etc… crucial in the social analysis of cultural practices? In the democratisation process of culture, how is European, national and local policy constructed and articulated? How to make transnational comparisons on urban culture networks in the era of globalisation?

Directors

• Ligia Ferro, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia (CIES-IUL)
• Otávio Raposo, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIES-IUL

Open Submissions

Peer Reviewed

T03 Mobility and urban flows: from transnational movements to virtual flows

Migrations, commuting and circulation in virtual and physical spaces reflect peoples’ movements that play out in multiple fronts. People use information technology in order to travel both physically and virtually, and this is just one paradigm of the variety of population flows. But circulation, accessibility and mobility are characterised both by creativity and by unequal access to circulation itself. The fate of cities and urban areas strongly depends on relations of competition and differentiation established between them at a global scale. How are these dynamics articulated with processes of social, spatial and cultural differentiation of urban areas and their growing hinterlands? There are multiple contexts in which we can analyse how the city shapes and is shaped by the circulation of goods, information and urban dwellers. What kind of daily changes are flows, networks and virtual interactions producing? Who is on the move and why? What are the new areas of circulation and settlement for migrants and commuters?

Directors

• Joana Azevedo, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIES-IUL
• Rita Cachado, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIES-IUL

Open Submissions

Peer Reviewed

T04 Making the city work: agency in a changing world

In the nineteenth century the city became a privileged place for the advent of modernity. From division and specialisation of labour to the invention of mechanisms that imposed new rhythms of daily life, a new form of social life emerged in the cities - an urban way of life. Today, in a world of global cities, the urban remains a prime area of experimentation to devise new ways of organising society; but cities are also places where individuals increasingly act in multiple fragmentations and discontinuities. From the industrial city to the global metropolis, we question the role of occupations on a constantly in reconfiguration process of 'making the city’. From politician to planner, street sweeper to police officer, taxi driver to call centre operator, artist to street seller, the hypotheses of analysis are endless. How do they act, imagine and represent the city that they, consciously or unconsciously, built and manage? In what contexts, networks and power relations, are they integrated and with which constraints and conflicts? What are the distances and proximities - geographical, social, cultural or economic - between them and the 'consumers' of the city?

Directors

• Gonçalo Gonçalves, Open University / CIES-IUL
• Bruno Monteiro, Instituto de Sociologia, Universidade do Porto (ISFLUP)

Open Submissions

Peer Reviewed

T05 (Re)producing urban fabric

Urbanisation and metropolisation enhance social and spatial differentiation of cities, making and remaking the multiplicity of social worlds that compose them. We would like to explore how is urban tissue produced: (1) discussing the role of space occupation cycles and new urban uses – from production of residential, touristic and economic attractiveness to informal, marginal, often illegal, forms of space occupation;  (2) taking into account the effects of job and activities location, suburbanisation, transport networks, equipments and symbolic and representational changes in the daily lives of urbanites; probing unequal experiences of centrality and periphery in the urban kaleidoscope; (3) understanding the rise and consolidation of new urban social worlds - often described, for example, as «creative quarters» or «ethnic neighbourhoods», but also as «gated communities» or other areas of self-segregation – and the persistence of old urban worlds , for instance: «working class districts», «suburban housing», old associations and urban collectives, etc...

Directors

• Pedro Costa, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), DINÂMIA-CET
• João Pedro Nunes, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), DINÂMIA-CET

Open Submissions

Peer Reviewed

T06 Building and living the urban space: conflict, inequality and coexistence in the enlarged city

Contemporary cities tend to enlarge, constituting themselves as metropolitan areas with increasingly complex dynamics. In this context, conservation and change interact on a permanent basis, not only in construction and requalification projects, but also in the way urban spaces, namely public space, are experienced by urbanites (whether residents, workers or users). These and other public and private actors – including policy makers, architects, planners, companies, formal and informal groups – associate and oppose themselves on  particularly visible processes.

This enlarged city represents the diversity of ways token nowadays by urban processes, involving the formation of new polarities, new centres of inter-urban relationship. What kinds of negotiations are established among the various agents involved in these processes? How are policies and practices of urban space construction contributing to the creation of new and old patterns of urban inequality? How and for whom are public spaces thought today? How is public space daily experienced and what patterns of social coexistence are there inscribed?

Directors

• João Martins, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (FCSH-UNL), Cesnova
• Patrícia Pereira, FCSH-UNL, CESNOVA

Open Submissions

Peer Reviewed

T07 Space as relation: cities and their multiple territories

With globalisation and intensification of financial capitalism came along a set of perspectives suggesting spatial compression. Space would tend to empty itself, becoming less important in face of widespread flows and electronic networks. Plus, a lack of differentiation between places has been anticipated for example, disappearance/urbanisation of rural spaces, or homogenisation of suburban areas, seen as a cluster in between city and countryside.

However, cities enhanced their role in the global world, as central nodes structuring network society. There are various types of urban space and multiple relations between urban/rural areas – as places of residence, work/study, family life, enjoyment, consumption/leisure – which create a set of mobilities of a different nature, frequency and scale.

We would like to probe new visions of cities and their areas, seen as relational spaces that develop contradictory processes (of opposition but also of cooperation). How can space be studied in its relational dimension? How to articulate different scales of analysis? What kinds of dynamics are created between different areas (urban, suburban, peri-urban, rural ...)? We look for multidisciplinary contributions that take into account these relational dynamics and the enduring relevance of territory in the composition of economic, social and cultural dynamics.

Directors

• Renato Carmo, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIES-IUL
• Sofia Santos, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIES-IUL

Open Submissions

Peer Reviewed

T08 From collaborative research to public knowledge

From the beginning, urban social research and intervention contributed, in different ways, to the complex process of defining and constructing cities and their population. This relationship, always present although not always appreciated in the academic world, is the marker of a particular/special form of urban sciences: the involved/applied/collaborative form. Thus, it is important to discuss and reflect on the different roles that researchers play in urban life – as producers of knowledge, participants in projects and agents of change. In this sense, we would meet and discuss innovative and cross- disciplinary experiences that broaden the horizons of action-research and applied/involved urban research; in parallel, we would discuss the challenges of producing an increasingly aware public.

We welcome presentations/papers exploring: How are different models of collaborative research and action-research developed around the world? How are the subjects themselves (“communities”, organisations and individuals) actively involved in the research process? How is the researcher herself/himself part of the urban transformation processes she/he studies?

 

Directors

• Pedro Abrantes, Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (CIES-IUL, Lisboa), Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS-Mexico)
• Graça Cordeiro, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIES-IUL
• Ioana Florea, Bucharest University, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work

Open Submissions

Peer Reviewed