Nachricht | Alternatives to Society - Analysis of Capitalism - Wohnen Urban Austerity: Impacts of the global financial crisis on cities in Europe

Call for Papers for the 10th Hermann-Henselmann-Kolloquium (December 2014)

The colloquium is organized by the Institute for European Urban Studies Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Hermann Henselmann Foundation and sponsored by the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation. It will take place on December 4th & 5th, 2014 at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany.

What started as a mortgage crisis in 2007 and became a global financial and economic crisis in 2008 has been transformed into a sovereign debt crisis since 2010. In all of these interwoven phases, cities have been, in multiple ways, at the heart of the turmoil. Against this background, we are delighted to announce our international conference “Impacts of the global financial crisis on cities in Europe”. The conference seeks to promote an interdisciplinary debate that exposes actual urban problems in their spatiotemporal dimensions, discusses regulatory restructurings under a new regime of austerity urbanism, and reflects on the role of urban social movements struggling for progressive alternatives. In the first part of the conference we will bring in academics, practi-tioners, and political activists from Greece to share their research and experiences. In the second part, we will invite contributions from established academics, early career researchers, graduate students, critical governors, and political activists on a broad range of urban topics focused on but not limited to the regions most affected in Southern and Southeastern Europe. The issues to be discussed will include urban austerity (Panel 1), housing crisis (Panel 2), urban governance and planning (Panel 3), urban conflicts and contestations (Panel 4), uneven socio-spatial developments (Panel 5), and urban infrastructures and public services (Panel 6). 

The enduring economic crisis itself and the “fiscal dictatorship” (Lehndorff 2012) imposed in the following years by German and European elites have affected urban regions dramatically as in-debted home-owner have been evicted, masses of people impoverished, public budgets squeezed, municipal infrastructures privatized, public services downsized, and, above all, austerity measures implemented. Therefore, we strongly encourage contributions, both single and comparative case studies focusing on one of the following panels, that discuss the various and uneven impacts of the crisis on European urban cities and regions. 

We invite all those focusing on urban research to apply for the conference and explicitly in-vite also researchers with a disciplinary background in urban planning, urban design or archi-tecture to participate in the conference. The conference language is English. 

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