Call for abstract – Governing the Urban: Addressing Urban Agendas from a Critical Perspectives

Organisers: Simonetta Armondi, Poltecnico di Milano, Italy – Sonia De Gregorio Hurtado, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

The term “urban agenda” has emerged in recent years to point out the increasing relevance of the urban issue in the policy scenario worldwide and the development of strategic and planning frameworks to guide urban development in a socio-economic scene in which cities need to improve importantly their capacity to face locally the negative effects of the pandemic, global ecological, social, and economic dynamics, and internal tensions in highly complex governance frameworks.  This can be considered the continuity of a trend that had its origin in the framework of crisis that characterized the 60s and the 70s (Armondi & De Gregorio Hurtado, 2019), and that from the 80s started to be formalized through the development of urban strategies at local level, and urban policy frameworks at regional and national levels in West Europe.  We argue that the recent international urban agendas (Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and New Urban Agenda of United Nations, the Urban Agenda for the European Union, the New Leipzig Charter) have given new momentum and visibility to that strategic practice. In the present moment, this practice needs to integrate innovation in the policy process of definition and implementation of the urban agendas to evolve previous models and approaches and to adapt them to current problems in a context of increasing uncertainty.  The aim of this session is to create an interdisciplinary framework for a critical reflection on innovative approaches, topics, priorities, mechanisms, and governance frameworks in explicit and implicit urban agendas developed by different government levels and non-institutional actors focused on the selective and strategic mobilization of the urban.

REFERENCE: Armondi, S. & De Gregorio Hurtado, S. (2019): Foregrounding Urban Agendas.  The new urban issue in European experiences of policy-making.  Springer.