Reassessing Conflict in Cities: planning and resilience

Description

Increasingly, cities have become the locus for the playing out of national, ethnic and religious conflicts. There has been, in the words of Arjun Appadurai, 'an implosion of global and national politics into the urban world.' As scholarly literature on the topic has become more extensive, there appears to be two main areas of enquiry: 1. cities as targets for acts of war and stringent security measures, and as the recipient of harsh manipulation and control; 2. divided or contested cities where embattled factions have altered key aspects of urban life and contributed to new forms of the spacio-political topography. By no means are these two areas mutually exclusive, and this workshop is dedicated to revisiting areas of urban conflict, and reassessing them in terms of the interaction between, on the one hand, the planned and imposed, and on the other, the responses and resilience of the everyday workings of cities in strife.

In order to investigate such an intersection, interdisciplinary study is necessary, and the workshop will include participants from: architecture, politics, geography, urban studies, planning, sociology, international relations, anthropology. Research of both a comparative and theoretical nature, and on specific examples, will be presented. The meeting will be an opportunity to consider these issues contextually, for example in terms of: the structure of urban conflict, the impact of history, the significance of major phenomena or events, the content and significance of particular sites, and the role of the city and methodology in such cross-cultural and interdisciplinary work. What constitutes everyday resistance and resilience, as part of the continuity of urban order is a key theme.

The Workshop is part of the research project Conflict in Cities: Architecture and Urban Order in Divided Jerusalem, supported by the ESRC-New Security Challenges programme. It follows a similar meeting held in 2004. Papers delivered will be considered for an edited book.

www.conflictincities.org