Decolonising Urban Futures: RGS-IBG 2024
DECOLAB will be hosting a session on “Decolonising Urban Futures: Mapping Alternative socio-spatial Narratives from the Global South” on 28 August at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference.
For centuries, colonialism and imperialism have functioned as systems of spatial organisation on both global and local scales (King 1989), leaving enduring legacies that continue to present significant urban challenges today. Contemporary efforts to address social (Oyewùmí 2011; Bonnett 2002; Stam and Spence 1983) and environmental injustices (Adger et al. 2001; Gilberthorpe and Rajak 2017) in cities through urban planning and environmental management often trace back to colonial and neo-colonial practices (Ha and Schneider 2016; Zwischenraum Kollektiv 2017). These practices include reliance on infrastructure-intensive solutions to urban issues and an extractivist worldview. Informed by a universal approach to knowledge production (Said, 1978), contemporary city-building tends to overlook the diverse social, temporal, and spatial continuities and discontinuities shaped by colonial legacies. This tendency results in generalizations about ‘non-Western’ urban forms (cf. Bishop et al., 2003; King, 2004; McFarlane, 2006a; Robinson, 2006), effectively erasing the perspectives of the ‘other’ in the urban production process (Bhambra 2014).A radical decolonising approach to (re)imagining cities can be a critical apparatus for recovering the voices and experiences of communities that allows for transgressing discourses of progress and universality on which colonial urban planning and design were founded.
The session invites papers from diverse disciplines to examine and explore alternative urban futures using decolonial lens. Topic of interests include but not limited to
- Public spaces and informal practices
- more-than-human and co-existence
- Decolonising methodologies
- Mapping alternatives through pedagogy
- (in)equitable urban futures
- Sense of place and belonging
- Socio-spatial practices and changing relations
- Socio-economic and political conflicts
- Informality and social innovation
- Top-down governance , planning and design
- Narratives of negotiations of change in place/space
- Cultural history, practices and rituals
