PORTAL Urban@LSE

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Urban studies and research at LSE
Urban@LSE is a portal for masters and doctoral teaching and for research activities on cities and urban issues across LSE. It aims to provide a resource for faculty, researchers and graduate students across the School, as well as an overview of urban teaching and research at LSE for prospective students and other visitors.

As an international centre of excellence in the social sciences, LSE has a long-standing commitment to an innovative understanding of urban society. LSE has a distinctive concentration of urban specialists in a number of disciplinary areas, and is an unrivalled centre for postgraduate study in the area of city design, urban and regional planning, urbanisation and development, and the economic, social, political and policy aspects of contemporary urban life. See contents panel for links to masters and PhD programmes on offer.

STUDY PROG MSc Regional and Urban Planning Studies. London School of Economics, London, UK.

Link to the program

The MSc Regional & Urban Planning Studies is a strongly focused and internationally based planning programme that has a long tradition in training both people seeking careers in urban and regional planning policy and mid-career professionals.  Founded in 1966 by the departments of Economics, Geography and Government, the programme (now housed solely in the department of Geography & Environment) continues a strong interdisciplinary focus challenging students to understand cities and regions from an economic, social and environmental perspective. The MSc aims to provide a common understanding of the various influences affecting the planning process, and to teach a set of research skills that will help planners in practice. These skills include urban and regional economic analysis, the evaluation of environmental and regional policies and the study of institutional and political factors that impact city and regional development. These perspectives will be applied to London and to a wide range of countries and cities through lectures and seminar debate.

Students join the course from many countries and from many different backgrounds in the social sciences and the design, planning and property professions. Most graduates go on to work in city, regional or environmental planning, particularly on the research and consultancy side of practice.

A strong sense of identity is generated in the student body, and the alumni keep in regular contact with each other through an annual newsletter. A number of walks are conducted early in the first term to help students orient to London and a fieldtrip is held during the Easter vacation, the destination is chosen by the students. This is held in various British regions or cities or on continental Europe. Recent student cohorts have chosen Istanbul, Berlin, Moscow, Dublin and Amsterdam. The students also run a Planning Society, which organises speakers, shorter trips and social events.

CONF, CfP British Association of American Studies(BAAS) Conference “Head West”. University of Exeter, UK. 18.-21.4.2013. Deadline: 1.11.2012

“Head West”
British Association for American Studies 58th Annual Conference

A 4-day conference to be held at the University of Exeter, 18-21 April 2013

We are delighted to announce that three plenary speakers have already been confirmed:

  • Paul Gilroy, Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics
  • Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture, Urbanism and American Studies at Yale University
  • Anders Stephanson, Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Professor of History at Columbia University

The conference will begin after lunch on Thursday 18th April and will close after lunch on Sunday 21st April.

American Studies at Exeter
American Studies has a long-standing presence at the University of Exeter. The research interests of staff include transatlantic literary relations, American criminality, film noir, the literature of the suburbs, the Hollywood blockbuster, US immigration, Seattle in the 1990s, the American musical, the culture of the American South, Irish American identities and literature, childhood in America, the Ku Klux Klan, and contemporary American comics. The University holds several major resources that are of interest to American Studies scholars, notably the American Music Collection (one of the largest archives of American popular music outside the United States) and the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture.

Exeter is located 12 miles from the sea, in the county of Devon, home to several Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Dartmoor National Park and the Jurassic Coast, a World Heritage Site.

Call For Papers
There is no overarching theme to the conference, and papers and panel proposals are welcomed on any subject that falls under the remit of American Studies. We invite proposals from individuals and from other interest groups including associations linked to BAAS, such as the APG, BGEAH, BrANCH, and HOTCUS. Half a century after 1963, we invite proposals inspired by the events of that year and the tumultuous decade that followed. 2013 also represents the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and we welcome suggestions for related papers and panels.

Proposals for 20-minute presentations should be a maximum of 250 words and include a provisional title. Proposals by two or more people sharing a common theme are warmly invited and we welcome panels that cross disciplinary boundaries. The conference organisers hope to continue the initiative shown at previous BAAS Annual Conferences by scheduling roundtable discussions and innovative panel presentations, and we encourage such proposals as appropriate.

All proposals should be submitted to baas2013@exeter.ac.uk by 1 November 2012.

Further Information
Conference Flyer
Gala Dinner Menu

Registration Details
Registration Form will be available soon
Online booking will be available soon

Venues & Accommodation
For further information, please contact the conference organisers

CONF, CfP British Association for American Studies 58th Annual Conference. Panel on ‘Cultures of the American Suburbs’. Deadline: 15.10.2012

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

In 2013, the University of Exeter will be hosting the British Association of American Studies(BAAS) Conference from 18-21 April. Professor Dolores Hayden, author of _Building Suburbia: A Field Guide to Sprawl_ will be the keynote speaker, and the Cultures of the Suburbs Network will be hosting a panel on ‘Cultures of the American Suburbs’. If you would like to contribute a paper to this panel – from any discipline or period – then please send a proposal to suburbs@exeter.ac.uk using ‘BAAS Suburbs Panel’ in the subject line. Deadline for submissions: 15 October 2012.

The Leverhulme Trust funded Cultures of the Suburbs International Research Network is a partnership between the Universities of Exeter and Kingston (UK), Witwatersrand (South Africa), Hofstra (USA), Griffith (Australia) and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

The Network aims to further the scholarly, professional and public understanding of the cultures of the modern (post-1900) suburbs through international and interdisciplinary research; to evaluate the place of cultural forms and practices in the suburbs, to explore the impact of cultural representations on the perceptions and practices of commentators and policymakers, and to investigate the importance of suburbanites’ own cultural engagement.

Visit the website at: http://suburbs.exeter.ac.uk
Contact us at suburbs@exeter.ac.uk and Follow us on Twitter @CulturesSuburbs.

For more details about the BAAS conference, visit http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/research/conferences/baas2013/

Jill Sullivan
University of Exeter

CONF, CfP Sixth Biennial Conference of the Society for the History of Children and Youth – “Space and Childhood in History”. University of Nottingham, UK. 25.-27.6.2012. Deadline: 31.10.2012

Call for Papers, Society for the History of Children and Youth, June 25-27, 2013

Conference Theme: “Space and Childhood in History”

The Sixth Biennial Conference of the Society for the History of Children and Youth will be held June 25-27, 2013,  at the University of Nottingham in Great Britain.

The Program Committee invites scholars to submit proposals for formal panels, roundtable discussions, and  research-in-progress workshops on any aspect of the histories of children and youth, from any place and in any era. But we are especially interested in sessions that examine and compare how space and childhood are mutually constitutive in historically and geographically specific settings. Our call, inspired by the French political philosopher Henri Lefebvre, posits that for any person, including children and youth, there is a dynamic rather than a static relationship between a physical place, its social make-up, and childhood as an ideal or imagined condition. The production of space, as Lefebvre famously insisted, happens in the physical world, the social world, and the imagined world. We ask scholars to investigate space not just as a backdrop for the lived experiences of children but as a tangible, social, and discursive construction, which shapes and is shaped by the lives and  experiences of children. Although committee prefers proposals for complete sessions and panels that incorporate international representation and global perspectives, individual papers will also be considered.

Session guidelines
Sessions will last approximately 90 minutes. At least fifteen minutes should be reserved for audience discussion. This may mean fewer – or shorter – formal papers, entertaining comments from the audience rather than scheduling a formal commentator, etc.

Submitting proposals
In order to be considered for the program, proposals must be received no later than October 31, 2012. They should include the following information:

  1. Session title (or title of individual paper)
  2. The session organizer’s name, department, institution, address, and e-mail address
  3. The following information for all participants:
    1. Names and roles (paper-presenter, chair, discussant, etc.)
    2. department and institution
    3. address and e-mail address
  4. 250-word abstract for each paper
  5. 2-pp. CV for each participant
  6. Please state what, if any, audio-visual technology will be required for each session or paper.

All parts of the proposal should be gathered into one PDF document and sent as an email attachment to james.marten@marquette.edu. The program committee will finalize decisions no later than January 31,
2013.

Direct queries to the co-chairs of the program committee:
James Marten, Marquette University, james.marten@marquette.edu
Marta Gutman, City College of New York, mgutman@ccny.cuny.edu

The other members of the committee are:
Margot Hillel, Australian Catholic University
Mary Clare Martin, University of Greenwich
Dirk Schumann, Universität Göttingen
Nicholas Syrett, University of Northern Colorado

Marta Gutman
City College of New York

CONF, CfP “The Transformation of Urban Britain since 1945”. University of Leicester, UK. 9./10.7.2013. Deadline: 1.2.2013

Call for Papers
The Transformation of Urban Britain since 1945

A conference organised by the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, 9-10 July 2013

Plenary Speakers: John Gold (Oxford Brookes); Frank Mort (Manchester); Guy Ortolano (New York University); Selina Todd (St Hildas, Oxford)

During the second half of the twentieth century the towns and cities of Britain were transformed more extensively than at any period since the industrial revolution. Millions of people were moved from the centre of cities to new urban settlements in what Alison Ravetz called ‘the greatest internal migration in British history’; whole manufacturing industries and their associated communities and cultures, which had dominated much of urban Britain north of the Trent for two centuries, were swept away in a matter of decades; and the steady influx of peoples from the old empire and Europe created new community formations and ultimately a multicultural Britain which was also overwhelmingly urban. Britain’s towns and cities today are barely recognisable from the drab and damaged places that emerged from the Second World War.
Continue reading “CONF, CfP “The Transformation of Urban Britain since 1945”. University of Leicester, UK. 9./10.7.2013. Deadline: 1.2.2013″

CONF, CfP “Grassroots in the City: Urban Movements and Activism in Central and Eastern Europe”. Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. 24./25.05.2013. Deadline: 1.12.2012

Call for Papers (pdf)

International conference on Grassroots in the City: Urban Movements and Activism in Central and Eastern Europe

Conference venue: Södertörn University, southern Stockholm, Sweden

Dates: 24-25 May 2013

The conference seeks to gather researchers working in the field of social movements and civic activism in the urban environment of Central and Eastern Europe. The aim is to discuss the prerequisites for, and forms of, collective action in cities in this social context.
Continue reading “CONF, CfP “Grassroots in the City: Urban Movements and Activism in Central and Eastern Europe”. Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. 24./25.05.2013. Deadline: 1.12.2012″

NETWORK PUKAR Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research

http://pukar.org.in/
Mission
PUKAR is an independent research collective and an urban knowledge production center that provides a platform for cross disciplinary, multi-sectoral, community based research for issues related to urbanization and globalization.

PUKAR aims to democratize research and broaden access to knowledge among disenfranchised or weakly institutionalized groups and to create a space from which their non traditional and non expert knowledge can contribute to local, national and global debates about their own futures. It promotes research as a right for everyone and uses it as tool for pedagogy, advocacy, intervention and transformation.

Goals
The goal of PUKAR is to create a world-class incubator for knowledge, debate and innovation about cities and globalization. It takes Mumbai as its conceptual base and laboratory for concerns related to global cities and helps create new urban knowledge, through maximum participation of the citizens, thus enhancing circulation of ideas, designs and concepts between the local and the global.

PUKAR aims to democratize research and broaden access to knowledge among disenfranchised or weakly institutionalized groups and to create a space from which their non traditional and non expert knowledge can contribute to local, national and local debates about their own futures. PUKAR is designed to complement, on the social and cultural side, the current growth in technology driven knowledge initiative in India.

PUKAR, an independent urban knowledge production center serves as a convener for debates and conferences, an executor for targeted research work and a disseminator through debate oriented white papers, discourses, and internet based reports, website and e-magazines. It works though the following means to achieve these goals:

Cross Knowledge
PUKAR facilitates corporate leaders, academics, policy makers, activists, cultural and social analysts, researchers and donors to brainstorm outside the constrains of a single institution, constituency or a project to identify new ways to think about urban challenges.

Partnerships
The center draws on partners from the world of urbanism, urban activists and practitioners, academicians and scholars, policy maker from public and private sector, in all its activities- initiation, execution, dissemination and evaluation.

Learning Lab
The center is set so that observers from other institutions and locations, including funders, can observe it’s working to see how they might initiate similar exercise in their own institutions, tailored to their needs.

PUKAR regards knowledge, action and research as interactive and recursive processes. Knowledge involves documentation and intervention. Action, in this perspective, involves exploration and innovation. Research, not simply a prerogative of academic world, is a disciplined means of acquiring new knowledge. PUKAR seeks to reinvent the terms of the relationship between knowledge, action and research.

FILM Creativity and the Capitalist City by Tino Buchholz

Movie at: http://www.creativecapitalistcity.org/

Creativity is fancy, glamorous and desirable. Who can be against creativity? At the same time it is used selectively  or economic purposes and consists of precarious and hard work. In this film, the search for creativity is linked to existential struggles for affordable housing and working space in Amsterdam, such as temporary accommodation, squatting, anti-squatting and some institutional synthesis: “breeding places” Amsterdam.

This film is more than a local documentary on Amsterdam. It explores the latest urban re-/development pattern in advanced Western capitalist cities. The hype around the creative city began already a decade ago, it is global in scope and about to reach its peak. After Richard Florida’s influential book “The Rise of the Creative Class” (2002) creativity has advanced to be the role model of urban regeneration: 
The New American Dream.

What is new about this dream? What happens when the hype is over? Housing as a job or the Right to the City?

featuring economic geographer Jamie Peck
University of British Columbia

It now includes 4 different subtitles:
polish by: Tomek Grzeschik, Bozena Grzeschik
dutch by: Jasper Overweg, Christian Zuidema
italian by: Giuseppe Carta, Lorenzo Tripodi
german by: Anne Großkurth, Tino Buchholz
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