Nowadays, there is a growing interest among anthropologists to do urban research that looks at both the government of the city and the dwellers' representations of the city (Lefebvre). Many ethnographies have thus focused, on the one hand, on urban policies and, on the other hand, on social practices. The Urban Anthropology Series - published by Ashgate - and the works published in the Journal Urbanities are good examples of this growing trend among anthropologists, which is consistent with the major transformation of cities around the world: gentrification, competition between cities, urban sprawl, mobility, heritagization, etc.. Urbanity is paradoxically claimed as one of the main attributes of Modernity at a time when cities are diluting and disseminating. The aim of this conference is to understand both the dreamed/planned cities and the experienced cities. However, we do not want to oppose those who think the city to those who inhabit and practice it. Everyone is entitled to have personal thoughts about the place where one lives.

Argument

Nowadays, there is a growing interest among anthropologists to do urban research that looks at both the government of the city and the dwellers' representations of the city (Lefebvre). Many ethnographies have thus focused, on the one hand, on urban policies and, on the other hand, on social practices. The Urban Anthropology Series - published by Ashgate - and the works published in the Journal Urbanities are good examples of this growing trend among anthropologists, which is consistent with the major transformation of cities around the world: gentrification, competition between cities, urban sprawl, mobility, heritagization, etc.. Urbanity is paradoxically claimed as one of the main attributes of Modernity at a time when cities are diluting and disseminating. The aim of this conference is to understand both the dreamed/planned cities and the experienced cities. However, we do not want to oppose those who think the city to those who inhabit and practice it. Everyone is entitled to have personal thoughts about the place where one lives.

General Convenors

• Michel Rautenberg, Centre Max Weber, Université Jean Monnet, St Etienne, France michel.rautenberg@orange.fr
• Corine Védrine, Centre Max Weber, Ecole nationale supérieure d’architecture de Lyon, France corine.vedrine@gmail.com

WORKSHOP 1

Planning for Renewal and Resettlement: Contested Visions

Convenor: Pr Dolores Koenig, American University, Washington, DC, dkoenig@american.edu

Politicians and urban planners often put forward visions of urban futures that involve new infrastructure, urban renewal, or large sporting events, which require the relocation of existing residents. Relocated residents rarely embrace these visions, asserting alternatives that value their ways of living; they offer their own visions, which imagine the poor as major contributors to the city. In 2003 when Vision Mumbai proposed steps to be taken to transform Mumbai into a “world-class city” by 2013, urban activists rejected the report, saying that it presented a vision of a city without poor people. They stressed instead that the poor were the basis of city life: building its buildings, keeping it clean, and serving its people.

This workshop seeks contributions that look at the particular clashes that occur when governments and private organizations propose development and change that involve the destruction of existing neighborhoods and the relocation of their residents. To what extent do politicians and urban planners justify these plans by visions of urban growth or quality of urban life? How do the potentially relocated respond? Under what conditions do they create alternative visions? When do they negotiate or collaborate with planners? What sorts of activism do they undertake?

WORKSHOP 2

From civil society to new social movements and beyond: urban lives and experiences at the time of neoliberal govenmentality

Convenors : Ass. Pr. Fotini Tsibididou (University of Macedonia-Greece) and Eleftheria Deltsou (University of Thessaly-Greece)

• eldelt@uth.gr
• ft@uom.gr

Neoliberal governmentality seems to have gone along with the displacement of organized civil society modalities with other forms of social mobilizations. This panel seeks to explore such different forms of urban living and re-acting, setting the following questions: What other already culturally available or newly imagined forms of relating constitute the new forms of social mobilization? What, utopian or not, visions of urban life become activated by these social movements, how do they put in practice different envisionings of city life and how do all these relate to other urban experiences? What tactics, strategies, poetics, and rhetorics do social movements employ in their effort to re-act against more or less authoritarian practices, like economic greed, precariousness at work, political corruption, deregulation, gentrification projects and many more? By investigating the above questions we seek to answer how these new forms of social movements, bringing city people together, inspire and shape new subjectivities and experiences of citizenship that are often based on emotions and are embodied through transindividual, performative experiences. We also seek to answer how these new modalities of imagining and practicing the city may also appoint the need to reconceptualize social values and socializing.

The panel invites anthropologists and other researchers of urban life from the social sciences and humanities to contribute in a cross-disciplinary meeting.

WORKSHOP 3

Emerging Practices in the City

Convenors : Pr. Fernando Monge, (National University of Distance Education, Spain) and Pr. Francisco Cruces, (National University of Distance Education, Spain).

• fernandomonge.fernando@gmail.com
• fcruces@fsof.uned.es

This panel focuses on the dreamed/planned spaces of those who inhabit, work or visit the city. By focusing on the emerging practices of those actors we would like to avoid the usual confrontation of urban policies and social practices, and highlight the way emerging practices of citizens, workers and tourists build the city. We would like to learn how these emerging practices display new ways of representing and living the city. 

Social movements like 15M or "Occupy ..."; youngsters meetings in the streets, parks and squares; common gardens growth by neighbors in abandoned places; suburbanites experiencing the historical core of the cities; squatters' urban renewal projects; public art; hidden networks that sustain the functioning of the city; or the inmigrants management of their urban life, are among those emerging practices we would like to deal with.

By focusing on bottom-up emerging experiences of the people in the city we have three aims:

1.1. to explore how emerging practices build, plan, and dream the city,

1.2. to get a comparative perspective of these urban phenomena; and,

1.3. to promote the collaboration among researchers dealing with these issues in different cities and countries around the world

WORKSHOP 4

Urban Changes and Attachments

Convenors : Dr Bianca Botea (Université Lumière Lyon 2) and Sarah Rojon (Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne)

• ebbotea@yahoo.fr
• sarah.rojon@gmail.com

Urban space is the fieldwork par excellence for the analysis of rapid changes experienced as challenge and uncertainty situations. We wish to examine the contexts of radical urban change considering the attachment perspective as a way of living in the city. Here attachment, understood as what we care for and what holds us, in other words what connects us, is defined by the instauration of singular spaces-times expressing the relations of individuals to their environment. However, in the situations of radical change these attachments are challenged, sometimes destroyed or totally reformulated, or even produced by these contexts.

The expected papers will be based on ethnographic approaches to various situations of radical change (building demolitions, evictions or deguerpissements, border changes, migration and forced displacement, fall of political regimes, industrial and economic crises, technological or ecological disasters, etc.). The proposals should address the following two points: first, describe the process of attachment in the various dimensions involved (sensory, cognitive, political); second, identify social practices through which contemporary attachments are expressed and acted upon (i.e. urban exploration - urbex, "urban walks", roots or memory tourism, construction of new religious and worship spaces, digital networks of citizen action, amateur activities, commemorative devices, etc.).

WORKSHOP 5

The Dreams and Nightmares of City Development: Urban Planning, Ideologies and Social Movements in Contemporary Cities

Convenors : Prof. Ass. Nebi Bardhoshi and Dr Olsi Lelaj (Albanian Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Arts Studies, Tirana, Albania)

• olsilelaj@gmail.com
• nedeba@yahoo.com

The concept of urban planning is embedded and cannot be read outside an ideological projection of relationships between the state, economy, politics and development in contemporary societies. The on-going economic crisis seems to have transformed the neo-liberal dreams into the nightmare of governments in many regions of the world, including the Mediterranean region. Citizens have seized the streets and through patriotic, nationalistic, ecological, or even communist chants are contrasting, affronting, and resisting to government’s policies for today’s measures and future perspectives. Thus the battle in urban areas between the citizen’s movements and governments policies has become also a battle for the future of the city. Thi panel aims to understand and explore the nature and dynamics of citizen’s movements in relations to central and local government politics of planning and future developments of the cities. We invite researchers to assess the current state of affairs, through ethnographic inquires and documentation, of the dialectics between citizens movements and central/local governments politics for the future development of Mediterranean cities.

WORKSHOP 6

The Formal and the Informal City in Africa: Planning and Governance Dilemmas

Convenor : Geoffrey I. Nwaka (Abia State University, Uturu, Nigeria).

geoffreynwaka@yahoo.com

Urban planning and governance have not adapted fast enough to the extraordinary situation of rapid urban change in Africa. The planning profession is in many respects still prisoner of received laws and codes tied to the colonial tradition, and established prior to the rapid urban expansion of the post colonial period. Many analysts have observed in post colonial Africa a new process of urbanization unleashed by the masses of relatively low income migrants who have flocked into the cities since independence, and are seeking to solve their problems of accommodation and employment informally, and on their own terms…; the urban poor are dominant, and in most cases are transforming the city to meet their own needs, often in conflict with official laws and plans.

Some élite neighborhoods enjoy relatively high quality housing and residential environment, but the bulk of the urban poor live in appalling and health-threatening conditions. UN-Habitat estimates that sub-Saharan African cities have over 166 million slum dwellers, most of who work in the informal sector where they simply do not earn enough to afford decent shelter and service. What does sustainability mean for such cities and townspeople? There is growing consensus that the battle for sustainability in Africa will be won or lost in the cities, and that it is best to target the poverty problem where it is growing fastest – in the cities.

Government officials and planner, who often aspire to international standards of modernity, face a difficult dilemma of how to plan and manage this rapid urban growth in a way that promotes employment, income and shelter for the poor, and at the same time ensures a reasonably orderly, healthy and socially acceptable environment. Unfortunately, many of these officials tend to blame the victims, and to see the urban poor, the informal sector and the slums in which they live as evidence of the failure of official policy, and therefore something to be removed though misguided policies of forced eviction and other forms of repression. But current research suggests that the path to urban peace and sustainability in Africa lies in building more inclusive and socially equitable cities “where everyone, regardless of their economic means, gender, age, ethnic origin or religion are enabled and empowered to participate productively in the social, economic and political opportunities that cities offer”.

While planner and municipal authorities have the responsibility to look beyond the short term, the real challenge in the African situation is how to strike the right balance between the ideals of international standards and the reality of local conditions and requirements. This calls for rethinking and broadening the narrow technical approach to conventional town planning and urban management by reviewing some of the unrealistic, arbitrary and discriminatory laws and codes in a way to accommodate the vast majority of excluded townspeople.

The panel welcomes papers that address the main challenges of formality and informality in urban planning and management in Africa; issues relating to urban poverty and social policy; movements to redress urban inequalities and grievances, and programmes to promote the growth of more inclusive, harmonious and sustainable cities.

WORKSHOP 7

Fundamentalist movements, Racism and Urbanity: conditions of emergence, spatialization and socio-anthropological aspects

Convenor : Ass . Prof. Frangopoulos Yannis (University of Thessaly) yfrago@uth.gr

The case: View the recent emergence of the racist movement in Greece that led to the killing of a rapper activist, anti-racist in popular area of Keratsini and the legal suspension of the pro-nazi Political Party[1] Chrissi Avgi (Golden Dawn), we are interested at the issue of racism in relation to conceptual-theoretical aspects of the phenomenon as well as at its sociospatial aspects. This issue has been one of the subjects of a course of Cultural Geography and Anthropology of Space at the School of Planning and Development of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

The issue: Far from wishing to limit the questioning only in the Greek context and the poverty that affects its population, we are interested with notions of ethnicity (Bacal, 1991), of the nation-nationalism, of the nation-state derived from modernity and the infligion - propagation of the idea of "the other" as archenemy, not only in respect to the immigrant but also any other image of otherness (heterodox, Hebrew, social groups to moderate ideas, anti-militarist, left and leftists, representatives of institutions of democracy, etc.). What are the sequences and the anthropological and psycho-social circumstances of such a process? Are they similar to European countries that have faced and currently face similar problems (Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine Now?) What links between racists’ "spatial practices" and collective representations that are associated? Spatial practices, representations of space and spaces of representation are paths to explore (Lefebvre, 2000). Would it include the psychological aspect of primitive self-identification in a super glorious ego of Savior-Tyrant?

Call: To the scientists who are interested in and work on the emergence of the phenomenon in relation to the city that are socio-anthropologists, psychosociologists, from political sciences and audiovisual and social communication sciences (film makers, journalists).

Bibliographie

• Bacal, A. (1991), ‘Ethnicity in the Social Sciences: a view and a review of the literature on ethnicity’, Reprint Paper in Ethnic Relations, 3, Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations.
• Lefebvre H, 2000, La production de l’espace, Paris, Anthropos.

Submission guidelines

Please, send your paper proposal (around 200 words) to the workshop convenors

before May, 15.

Scientific committee of the conference

• Ahmed Boubeker, University of St Etienne (France)
• Bella Dicks, University of Cardiff (UK)
• Ivaylo Ditchev, University of Sofia (Bulgaria)
• Jerry Krase, Brooklyn College (USA)
• Italo Pardo, University of Kent (UK)
• Giuliana Prato, University of Kent (UK)
• Manos Spyridakis, University of Corinth (Greece)

INFORMATIONS 

Conference registration

CUA Members who have paid their IUAES subscription : 30 Euros (including meal tickets)
CUA Members who have not paid the IUAES subscription : 40 Euros (including meal tickets). For the subscription : http://www.iuaes.org/membership.html) 
Non CUA Members : 80 Euros (including meal tickets)
Students : free (excluding meal tickets).

Venue

The conference will be held at IRAM (International Rhône-Alpes Média), Université Jean-Monnet de Saint-Etienne.

7 rue Pablo Picasso

42000 Saint-Etienne

To see the map :

http://portail.univ-st-etienne.fr/bienvenue/presentation/iram-488874.kjsp

By plane :

1) Arrival to the airport of Lyon Saint-Exupery.

2) Then take the Tramexpress : https://www.rhonexpress.fr/ from the airoport to the railway station Lyon Part-Dieu.

3) At the railway station, take the train for Saint-Etienne Chateaucreux (there is a train every 30 minutes).

4) Arrival in Saint-Etienne : in front of the railway station, take the Tram n°1 or n°2 to the station "Cité du design".

Accomodation

You can find inexepensive hôtels here : http://saint-etiennetourisme.com/en/accommodation/
We can suggest you some places : 
Hôtel Continental http://www.hotelcontinental42.fr/

Hôtel de la Tour : http://www.hoteldelatour.fr/

Or you can find inexpensive flats rent by particulars in this website : https://www.airbnb.fr/s/saint~etienne?source=bb

[1] Imprisonment of his political leader indicted with creating a criminal organization.

Venue & Date: University Jean Monnet, St Etienne, France, 8-10 July 2014