RN37 - Urban Sociology

The Research Network 37 on Urban Sociology aims to stimulate the scientific debate on urban issues (space, everyday life, problems, opportunities, etc.), with attention to create a cross-disciplinary space of exchange.

The Research Network Urban Sociology aims to stimulate scientific debate within the area of Urban Sociology, by creating a cross-disciplinary space of exchange open to sociologists and scientists from other disciplines interested in creating knowledge about, but also intervening in, urban space and urban life. The Research Network started in Turin in 2013 as a Research Stream on Urban Sociology and Public Spaces (http://www.esa11thconference.eu/call-for-papers/research-streams/RS12).

The network was formally constituted the next year and a first Midterm conference, with the theme Public Spaces, Private Lives, was organized in November 2014 in Lisbon, with Kirsteen Paton and Ray Hutchinson as keynote speakers. In Prague, the next year, the first Coordination and Board were elected and we had very interesting sessions. In 2016, our second midterm conference took place in Krakow, where we welcomed around 170 urban researchers, including keynote speakers Saskia Sassen, Talja Blockland, Ayo Mansaray and Jacek Gądecki. You can read all about it in our blog: https://esarn37.hypotheses.org/649. With carefully selected contributions from the conference, the coordination and board published a book with Springer: Moving Cities – Contested Views on Urban Life (https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783658184612).

In Athens, in 2017, we publicly presented the book and organized a keynote with João Teixeira Lopes, the first coordinator of RN37.

In our last Midterm Conference in Madrid (June 2018), we had two very interesting keynote lectures by Jesus Leal and Susanne Hall and many interesting sessions around the main theme: "Inequality and uncertainty: current challenges for cities".

Most recently, we met in Manchester, for the 2019 ESA Conference (https://www.europeansociology.org/about-esa-2019/programme).

All are welcome!

Blog: https://esarn37.hypotheses.org/

Facebook: www.facebook.com/esarn37/

E-mail: rn37.esa[at] gmail.com

2021-2023

Coordinators

Gabriele Manella (University of Bologna, Italy)

Vice-Coordinator:

Katarzyna Kajdanek (University of Wroclaw, Poland)

Board Members

Anna Bednarczyk (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)

Madalena Corte-Real (DINÂMIA'CET – ISCTE-IUL, Portugal)

Niccolò Morelli (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, Italy)

Jan Üblacker (EBZ Business School University of Applied Science, Bochum, Germany)

Phd Student Representative:

Rui Carvalho (Brown University, Providence, United States)

V Midterm Conference: "Seeing Like a City / Seeing the City Through"

October 5-7, 2022

In presence conference

(in partnership with Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Research - Humboldt University Berlin)

Information

Urban citizenship implies a fragmentation of claims that affects rights to the city as universal, all‐inclusive ideals: we see a trend towards a diversification of interests, a weakening and separation of movements, and competition about resources rather than more solidarities within groups working as collectives on the pathway to a livable and more just city. Such urban citizenship is always in conversation with modes of governance, which vary greatly among Europe.
Different modes of governance always require categorizations on various scales. Starting from the central argument of James Scott Seeing Like a State (1999) that any government means categorization, and any categorization fails to acknowledge the metis of locally embedded practices, knowledges, and ways of seeing and doing things, especially on and from the urban margins, this conference seeks to sociologically address this tension. The ‘City’ as a set of local state institutions imagines, regulates, categorizes, classifies, and intervenes in the urban and shapes citizenship and belonging. Second, however, the city cannot be made nor planned and will always be, as AbdouMaliq Simone formulated in For the City Yet to Come (2004), in the
making through practices and logics outside of the view of the state which defy standards and categories. Everyday tactics see people through in their daily lives and see through the city: finding new ways to get things done under constantly changing urban conditions. Yet city politics must draw boundaries and categorize, as any political decision implies a categorization.
How can ‘seeing like a City’ and ‘seeing the City through’ be brought together in new ways, given the current transformations of our cities?
This frames the program of the fifth RN37-ESA Midterm-Conference in Berlin, hosted by the Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Research at Humboldt University Berlin, in collaboration with the Sektion Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie of the German Society of Sociology (DGS) and various Berlin-based urban scholars. The conference will take place in-person from the 5th to the 7th of October 2022.

The call for panels is available at the following link: https://esarn37.hypotheses.org/

To follow updates on the V ESA RN37 Midterm please visit also:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/esarn37
Twitter: @Rn37S

RN37 - Call for panels V Midterm Conference

Public space and private lives in contemporary city. I Midterm Conference, 2014, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon (Portugal)

Moving cities: Contested views on urban life. II Midterm Conference, 2016, Jagiellonian University, Krakow (Poland)

Inequality and uncertainty: current challenges for cities. III Midterm Conference, 2018, UNED Madrid (Spain)

Europe and Beyond: Boundaries, Barriers and Belonging. ESA Conference 2019, Manchester (United Kingdom)

Urban Theory and Urban Praxis: Past, Present and Possible Futures. IV Midterm Conference, 2021, Bologna (Italy)

Contribution by RN37 in The European Sociologist, issue 44, 2020

RN37 Biennial Report for 2017-2019
RN37 Biennial Report for 2015-2017