Annual Meeting of the AAG, April 21-25, 2015, Chicago, IL
CFP: Everyday geographies of global, urban infrastructures of energy
Session Organizers: Jonathan Silver (Durham University), Anthony Levenda (Portland State University)
Energy forms a crucial support system for the everyday reproduction of urban life in all its forms (Gandy 2005; Swyngedouw 2006). The planetary scale infrastructures that produce and distribute energy for towns and cities are actively being reconfigured across various geographies in response to a range of ongoing global-local pressures, processes and imperatives (Swyngedouw 1997) including climate change and low carbon agendas (Bulkeley & Newell 2010; Hodson & Marvin 2010), securitization (Graham 2010), financial crisis and ongoing forms of political contestation (McFarlane & Rutherford 2008). Such material transformations are shaping new geographies both within and beyond urban regions (Graham & Marvin 2001) that suggest new considerations about politics, inequality and everyday life across energy infrastructures.
This session is interested in the everyday geographies of planetary (urban) infrastructures of energy relating to extraction, distribution, supply and consumption. Such geographies suggest the need to pay close attention to the ways in which these global, urban infrastructures of energy are shifted and intervened across by various social interests (Hughes 1983). This call for papers seeks contributions from scholars interested in these everyday transformations of energy infrastructures from a micro scale setting of the household through to the vast pipelines that transport oil across politicized landscapes. We invite papers focused both on the global North and South, or sensitive comparative analyses (Ward 2008; Robinson 2011), including topics such as:
- The daily operations of planetary scale infrastructures
- Geographies of informality and incrementalism
- The struggles around energy poverty, precarity, and security
- The politics of knowledge and energy technology in everyday settings
- Contestations and resistances across various forms of energy infrastructure
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words by email to both anthonylevenda@pdx.edu and j.d.silver@durham.ac.uk by November 3rd. Notifications of inclusion in the session will be made by November 5th.
References
Bulkeley, H., & Newell, P. (2010). Governing climate change. Routledge.
Gandy, M. (2005) Cyborg Urbanization; Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (1) 26-49
Graham, S. (2010). Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso.
Graham, S., and Marvin, S. (2001). Splintered Urbanism. New York: Routledge.
Hodson, M., and Marvin, S. (2010). World Cities and Climate Change. Milton Keynes:Open University Press.
Hughes, T. (1983) Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880‐1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
McFarlane, C., and Rutherford, J. (2008) ‘Political infrastructures: Governing and experiencing the fabric of the city’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(2), pp363–74.
Robinson, J. (2011) Cities in a world of cities. The comparative gesture. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Vol 25, pp1-11.
Swyngedouw, E. (1997) ‘Neither Global nor Local: Glocalization’ and the Politics of Scale’, in Cox, K. (1997) (ed.) Spaces of Globalization. New York: Guilford Press, pp137–66.
Swyngedouw, E. (2006) ‘Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities’, Science and Culture, 15 (2), pp105-121.
Ward, K. (2008) Towards a comparative (re)turn in urban studies? Some reflections. Urban Geography, 29, pp405-410.