Call For Papers
AAG 2017 Boston (April 5-8, 2017)
Session title: The Urban Politics of Policy Failure
Much attention has been paid to urban management and redevelopment success stories. Urbanists are grappling with the ways that successful models or best practices can come into the politics of managing cities and their people. Whether looking at unique aspects of a city that contribute to its vitality, or searching for a model that ‘works’, city makers and urban scholars alike are interested in successes. Less attention has been paid however to the processes and outcomes of policy failure. How is failure framed and understood? Why is it that some policies don’t succeed? What happens to failed policies? How do cities deal with failure? Where do the concepts of success and failure fit into longer historical narratives of the city? And what are the spatial politics that surround questions of failure vs. success? This session examines the interaction of policy failure and urban politics, policies, and changing spatial configurations within cities. In doing so, we hope to extrapolate analysis of urban geographies that challenge and reconfigure our understanding of contemporary urban governance.
We welcome papers from diverse conceptual, empirical and geographic perspectives on themes like, but not limited to:
> Causes and consequences of urban policy failure.
> Legacies of failed urban policies.
> Failure and success in policy mobilities.
> Infrastructural and ecological dimensions of policy failure.
> Topological and relational geographies of failure.
Please send a 250 word abstract by October 1st to Cristina Temenos (cristina.temenos@manchester.ac.uk) and John Lauermann (jlauermann@tamu.edu).