The Fixity and Flow of Urban Waterfronts

[i]Call for Papers[/i] The International Network of Urban Waterfront Research Hamburg, Germany October 10/11 2008 [b]Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: June 10, 2008[/b] 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. Paper titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words must be submitted by June 10, 2008. Abstract should be emailed as a Word attachment to Gene Desfor [url=mailto:desfor@yorku.ca]desfor@yorku.ca[/url] or Dirk Schubert [url=mailto:dirk.schubert@hcu-hamburg.de]dirk.schubert@hcu-hamburg.de[/url] Notifications of paper acceptances will be made by July 1, 2008.