The Fixity and Flow of Urban Waterfronts Conference- Hamburg

[i]Call for Papers[/i] Hamburg, Germany October 10/11 2008 [b]Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: June 10, 2008[/b] The International Network of Urban Waterfront Research with HavenCity University and sponsored by the Thyssen Foundation are organizing a two-day academic conference devoted to exploring critical dimensions of both recent and historic cases of urban waterfront change. We invite you to submit a paper for the conference. I. Changing Urban Waterfronts Beginning with the earliest port cities, waterfronts have always played a central role in urban development processes whether viewed from the perspective of promoting economic growth and trade, boosting urban expansion, being a site of intense nature-society relationships, or forming complex governance arrangements to handle jurisdictional entanglements. Recently, place entrepreneurs and governments have become partners in making large-scale investments in major waterfront projects intended to enhance a city's competitive position in an increasingly important international economy. Cities are promoting waterfront developments plans both as "spaces of promise" and as territorial wedges for promoting twenty-first century accumulation strategies. The theme of the conference, The Fixity and Flow of Urban Waterfronts, captures many of the tensions that propel waterfront change, and provides a conceptual frame from which to critically analyze the dynamism and interconnectedness of the tangle of relations and organizations associated with waterfront development. The theme refers to multi-scale and multi-actor social and biophysical processes by which the "fixity" of the built environment interacts with the "flow" of economic, political, environmental or spatial forces. As cities compete to attract investments, investors and 'creative classes', these sometimes complementary but often contentious development processes look to waterfront sites to become the dominant spaces that lead urban transformations. In this conference, papers from a wide range of disciplines will explore relationships between "fixity" and "flow" in historic or current experiences of waterfront transformations. Topics for papers include, but are not limited to, theoretical or empirical analyses of: - the fixity of built environments meeting the flow of economic, political, environmental or spatial forces, - historic analyses of changing port-city relations, - democratic practices and community participation, - the role of sustainability discourses in action models for development, - flexibilities of property development practices, - flows of new immigrants through waterfront spaces, - dynamics of multiple-scale analysis of economic and political activities, - planning for development, - cultural planning and projects, - interactions between biophysical and human systems in changing waterfronts, - social and environmental justice, - regulatory and governance arrangements, - political ecologies of waterfront change, - new port-security practices and their implications for the movement of goods and people and labour organization, and - the impact of tourism on relationships among people, nature, and economy in waterfront spaces. Hamburg provides a particularly appropriate location for the conference: it is a city with a long and rich waterfront history, and recent changes to these lands and plans for additional expansion of port facilities all make for an exciting case to see and study. II. The conference program The program of the conference is organized around the following dimensions: 1. Historic and Contemporary Studies of the Dynamics of Urban Waterfront Change Although it is recognized that ports and waterfronts have undergone major transformations in the last decades, one of the most challenging problems for waterfront research is formulating a conceptualization of how and why waterfront spaces are changing. Waterfronts are one of the most prominent urban spaces where tensions that originate from globally-centralized economic functions, local demands to regulate everyday life, and major alterations to socio-natural processes become highly intertwined. But, conceptualizations of dynamic processes of change - those which set particular experiences in a broader socio-natural context and include both the territory of the waterfront and simultaneously its de-territorialized spaces - have been elusive. Papers in this session will contribute to elaborating how a fixity and flow approach contributes to overcoming this problem. 2. Governance of Ports and Urban Waterfronts In many port-cities, new governance structures and regulatory practices have been set in place to stabilize urban waterfront development processes. These organizations have been established to regulate relationships between the fixity of infrastructure configurations and the flow of people, information, goods, and commodities through ports and waterfronts. Fixed administrative boundaries and regulations are being penetrated by rapid flows of information, goods and services, a mobile labour force, security issues, and politics of labour-management relations. 3. Urban Waterfront Property Development A host of new multi-scale and mixed public-private arrangements have been created to facilitate property development on waterfronts where complex land ownership patterns, environmental problems and competing land-use activities add considerable complexity to the functioning of land markets. Control and management of property development in these situations has become contentious and a great concern for many groups in civil society. This dimension of the conference examines the ways that property development fixes social relations in space through the logic of wealth accumulation and associated political and economic process as well as the flow of context-dependent historic specificities. 4. Continuity and Change on Urban Waterfronts While new shipping technologies and regulatory policies have dramatically altered labour practices on working waterfronts, the identities of waterfront neighbourhoods have also changed. The extent to which, and the ways by which, continuity and change has proceeded in waterfront neighbourhoods needs to be examined. Currently, cultural events and productions - new art galleries, museums, entertainment zones, major sports competitions, and annual culture fairs - have been used to promote new neighbourhood identities. This dimension of the workshop will explore the ways continuity and change has proceeded in waterfront neighbourhoods, and in particular it will examine cultural productions, sexual politics, "race" and post-coloniality, and gendered analyses in the social production of identity, both individual and collective. 5. Sustainable Urban Waterfronts Sustainability and ecological modernization, a closely related term originating in Europe, have become mantras for many waterfront developments. From the revitalization of urban ecologies, to the adoption of "green" development objectives, and to civil society involvement in neighbourhood planning processes, sustainability and ecological modernization encompass a broad range of actions in current urban waterfront transformations. The integration of sustainability and ecological modernization schemes into waterfront developments raise questions about issues such as the social and ecological impacts of property development, tensions or convergences between ecological restoration and industrial uses, conflicts and consensus over natural resource uses, and the governance of sustainability. II. Sessions Each session will have three or four paper presentations of fifteen to twenty minutes each. Following the presentations, time will be devoted to questions and discussion. The language of the conference is English. Notifications of paper acceptances will be made by July 1, 2008.