[from URB-GEOG-GORUM] Submissions are invited for the panel “Metropolitan Streets: Everyday Temporalities and Contemporaneity”, as part of the forthcoming conference “Metropolitan Temporalities”, November 20 – 22, 2014 at the Technische Universität in Berlin, Germany.
Over the past three decades, both urban studies and globalization studies have predominately focused on spatial concerns, often neglecting the important temporal dimensions of global urban development. Our third annual conference therefore seeks to systematically examine the diverse temporal aspects of global exchange and metropolitan development in four thematic clusters: metropolitan pasts and futures; politics of time; metropolitan rhythms; and economies of time.
Session Description:
Historically, streets and their social and spatial orders have changed over time according to the respective societal setting. Streets have always been the most profound units of urban life and the main elements to structure urban form and transportation. However, with the rise of the profession of urban planning, streets have been increasingly reshaped, according to the planner’s ideals of their time.
Today, streets with their specific spatial and social orders are the most dynamic space-time settings in a metropolis: they comprise a high degree of mobility, varying uses, agents, everyday practices and activities, norms, values, symbolic meanings, and power relations as well as a constant negotiation in between them. All of these coexist and affect each other according to the time of the day, week, year, and season. Thus, an ever changing social and spatial environment is being produced in metropolitan streets which has its own temporality and contemporaneity.
In this panel we would like to address the intertwined relationship between spatial order, social order, everyday practices, and time in the urban street. Thus we welcome papers dealing with these different levels of temporalities and contemporaneity, as well as their historical dimensions.
Session Organizers: Anna Steigemann, Annika Levels, and Christian Haid
Please submit an abstract of 300 words by April 30th 2014 to one of the session organizers anna.steigemann@metropolitanstudies.de, annika.levels@metropolitanstudies.de, or christian.haid@metropolitanstudies.de, and to emily.bereskin@metropolitanstudies.de
urbanculturalstudies 