HomeParticipant informationRegistrationGrantsScientific ProgrammeSocial ProgrammeField tripsTravel & accommodationExhibitionSponsorsPress & mediaLinksIGU Conferences & ActivitiesContact

Chair(s): Ludger Basten & Lienhard Lötscher

Abstract:
Societies around the world have experienced and are experiencing a series of transformations that, through human agency in various forms, “take place”, make places and shape spaces in our cities and urban regions. Viewing these transformations as socio-political processes, embedded in local cultures and customs while at the same time connected to and interdependent with processes of (not just local) economic restructuring, our cities have become arenas of heightened contestation, where interests collide and conflicts are acted out. The increasingly multi-layered social and ethnic fabric of many of our cites has led to more complex structures of contestation as well as more intricate patterns of social spaces and life worlds. Polarization or fragmentation of social spaces along lines of income, ethnicity or religion, the reconfiguration of local political agendas in line with the competitiveness-mantra of neo-liberal and often anti-statist ideologies, the physical restructuring of urban space that follows or possibly structures some of these social changes – these are just some examples of the processes of social transformation we want to focus on in this session. We wish to explore both the processes as well as the patterns that emerge, to analyze the tensions between supra-local forces on the one hand and local conflicts and solutions on the other, and to investigate to what degree the locally (or nationally) specific can be explained or informed by views and theories of a more generalizing nature.

Timeslots: 2
 

Chair(s): Werner Breitung & Gu Chaolin

Abstract:
With the huge magnitude of Chinese urbanisation and with the regional clustering of urban growth, globally significant mega-urban regions such as the Pearl River Delta, the Beijing-Tianjin and the Lower Yangtse agglomerations, to name just the most important, have emerged. However, the governance of Chinese urban space has throughout this process always remained very territorialised and has been characterised by strong competition rather than cooperation and integration of adjacent administrative entities. Only recently, with the official acknowledgement and more positive evaluation of these mega-urban regions, has there been a heightened attention by the central state towards regional governance in Chinese mega-urban regions. Many of the abovementioned regions have developed regional plans and communication channels between the concerned municipal governments. There are now numerous initiatives being developed to connect infrastructures and to integrate the provision of public services in these agglomerations.
The purpose of this paper session is to bring together scholars doing empirical research on the emerging regional governance in Chinese mega-urban regions ith those contributing experiences and theoretical conceptualisations derived from long-standing international research on regional governance. We expect to promote comparisons both within China and internationally, and we intend to encourage the engagement of empiricism with a more theoretical understanding. Crucial directions of investigation could be concepts of multi-level governance with reference to scale theories, the governance of regional competitiveness in times of globalisation, and the conceptualisation of the relative roles of the state versus markets in regional development. The focus shall be governance across administrative boundaries in the mega-urban context. What is particularly hoped for is that the presented studies from China aim at developing originally Chinese contributions to theory-building rather than just applying "foreign" theories to the processes observed in the mega-urban regions of this rapidly urbanising country.

Timeslots: 1

Chair(s): Christian Matthiessen & Céline Rozenblat

Abstract:
There is little doubt that our urban systems have seen radical changes in the last decade and will continue to do so in the coming decades. A few hundred city regions today account for much of the world's consumption and production, just as a few hundred large corporations now dominate most of the world's trade and sites of production. One result of these changes is that these core cities (the 'World Cities') are increasingly connected in many ways: by more rapid, more intense, and spatially extensive linkages of information, goods and money, as well as migration and tourism. Large corporations – and seemingly all too identical national/regional policies – link distant cities into the same global strategies, and international agencies encourage states to co-operate in international governance. At the same time the intense interaction supports greater variation in economic and political roles among cities dealing with increasing problems of economic competition and development, often based on the role of these cities as centres of innovation and as nodes in networks of ideas, innovation and information.
In this session we would like to discuss just how the various national, continental and global urban systems are changing regarding features such as city size, economic specialization, migration, interaction and control functions? Also, we would like to inquire what processes and differential development paths are involved and how different government policies affect these changes – not just in the biggest and arguably most successful cities, but also in those of lesser centrality or in those that have chosen to follow more unusual development/policy paths.

Timeslots: 1

Session: Large scale transport infrastructure and regional and urban impacts