Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting,
29 March – 2 April 2016, San Francisco
Session:
After New Urbanism
Session Convenors: Dan Trudeau (Department of Geography, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA) and Susan Moore (Bartlett School of Planning, University College, London, UK).
The planning and design movement known as the New Urbanism, and its associated built forms, has firmly established itself as one of the most influential and prolific development trends of the last century in many parts of the world. New Urbanism can no longer be essentialized as the Seaside, Kentlands, ‘Truman Show’ version oft-referred to when describing the projects associated with the movement. The influence of New Urbanism, its principles, but more exceptionally, its built forms can be found in disparate places, including Masdar City (UAE), Lavasa (India), Jakriborg (Sweden), Orchid Bay (Belize), Melrose Arch (South America), Beacon Cove (Australia). In other words, the influence of New Urbanism is now apparent in every continent. What was largely characterised as a greenfield suburban trend or fad in the US has increasingly found expression through inner city and major regeneration projects in cities the world over.
Yet, the presumed universalism of it as a global suburban movement, with one singular point of origin and replicable template oversimplifies the significance of New Urbanism as a major development trend. The specificity of the (North) American fight against suburban sprawl, the promotion of transit-oriented development and the revitalization of community through traditional neighbourhood scale design practices and planning tools most often associated with the New Urbanism label, is not the ‘universal’ that has travelled and proliferated. Today, the movement has significantly expanded beyond the insular, domestic concerns of its ‘originators’. New Urbanism is now more than ever a heterogeneous movement that produces variegated built forms and communities and its influences are increasingly typified as part of mainstream development ‘best practice’. New Urbanism, it might be argued, is now the norm rather than the exception. In the 30 years since the New Urbanism gained notoriety as a ‘force’ to be reckoned with, we contend that it is time to seriously re-frame and de-universalise the assumptions of New Urbanism to draw critical attention to its heterogeneity, contingency and increasingly mainstream presence.
In this session we seek critical and empirically-driven papers from an international perspective which explore the extent to which it can be argued that we now have multiple New Urbanisms, with a hybridity of forms and processes generally acknowledged as ‘New Urbanist’, suggesting a social, economic and political complexity hitherto under-explored in the existing critiques of the movement as merely a reflection back onto itself (i.e. broken promises, aspirational visions, dubious ideologies, diversions from the original vision, etc.). More specifically, we seek to elaborate what an ‘after’ New Urbanism perspective might look like and how it might contribute to more critical studies of the typification of New Urbanism as mainstream development and planning best practice and the implications this has for better understanding its mobility and global reach.
Papers dealing with, but not limited to, the following themes are welcomed:
- Mainstreaming of New Urbanism in policy and practice
- Mobility of the movement in an ‘after’ New Urbanism era
- Divergence of practices and rationalities and yet a convergence of variegated urban forms in different international contexts that are recognizable as New Urbanism
- New Urbanism and its significance to understandings of post-suburban politics and governance
- Place-based contingencies in generating New Urbanism projects
Please send a 250 word abstract to Susan Moore (susan.moore@ucl.ac.uk) and Dan Trudeau (Trudeau@macalester.edu) by October 15th.