Organised by Bae-Gyoon Park

In the face of unprecedented challenges such as climate change, pandemics, and socio-economic crises, cities must be transformed to proactively provide adequate communal support that enables humanity to respond collectively to polycrisis. Why cities? It is because existing public solutions (either state-centered or market-oriented) have been found to react inadequately to the diverse political and social needs and demands that are emerging alongside what Lefebvre called “urban revolution”, or the rise of urban society. As Lefebvre predicted, humanity is now experiencing an urban revolution. While entering an urban society, we are still blinded by the grammar and logic of industrial society. Thus we are unable to approach and understand the current crises and challenges we face through urban contexts and sensibilities and consequently fail to respond properly in an urban way.

Based on this problem awareness, this session aims to explore the possibilities of alternative systems of collective solidarity and cooperation at the urban scale and context. In particular, moving beyond the traditional ‘state-market’ dichotomy, which has constrained the imaginative and visionary possibilities of contemporary public systems (Bollier, 2014; Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014), we want to examine how to empower and enable people to actively engage in the collective process of making cities alongside a myriad of others. More specifically, we are interested in the concrete ways to enable people to become active citizens, who are autonomously engaged in urban governance and the processes of collectively co-producing goods and services for their needs. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Enabling infrastructure for convivial cities

• Urbanization and heterogeneity

• Conviviality and co-production

• Emerging forms of urban political subjectivity

• Right to the city

• Spatial politics of urban transformation

• Urban commons

• Platform urbanism