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CALL FOR PAPERS RETHINKING URBAN INCLUSION: SPACES, MOBILISATIONS, INTERVENTIONS to be held in Coimbra, Portugal, 28-30 June 2012 With almost half the world's population living in cities, questioning the urban dimension of social inclusion and exclusion is imperative. Urban inclusion is increasingly influenced - and often constrained - by intertwined processes of economic globalization, state re-articulation, polarization and diversification of (local) populations and the political practices they add to the city. Educational, health and environmental inequalities, segregation, unemployment, lack of political participation, discrimination and the inability to deal with different forms of participation are all phenomena of exclusion with a local dimension but a multi-scalar nature. At the same time, acting towards social inclusion is developed around ideas, knowledge(s), experiences, resources and capacities which are (dis)located across an array of arenas and distributed among different actors. While traditional concepts and practices of urban inclusion centered on institutions and top-down decision-making seem inadequate to tackle this complexity, new ones are often in their infancy and may be in tension with more established policies. Contesting the centrality of the state and market pervasiveness, a new variety of counter-hegemonic positions and projects, and alternative visions of urban democracy and justice that inform bottom-up and participatory approaches to urban inclusion, have become popular in the Global South, while their transposition to cities in the Global North have met resistance or hardly gone beyond theorization.  The Conference aims to understand and ultimately rethink social inclusion at the urban scale, as the product of broader dynamics and the interaction of different actors and languages. How can we trace, define, and challenge the new subtle forms of social and territorial exclusion, trying to reinvent urban in

Recapturing Democracy is a short yet synoptic introduction to urban democracy in our era of political neoliberalism and economic globalization. Combining an original argument with a number of case studies, Mark Purcell explores the condition of democracy in contemporary Western cities. Whereas many scholars focus on what Purcell calls "procedural democracy" - i.e., electoral politics and access to it - he instead assesses "substantive democracy." By this he means the people's ability to have some say over issues of social justice, material well being, and economic equality. Neoliberalism, which advocates a diminished role for the state and increasing power for mobile capital, has diminished substantive democracy in recent times, he argues. He looks at case studies where this has occurred and at others that show how neoliberalism can be resisted in the name of substantive democracy. Ultimately, he utilizes Henri Lefebvre's notion of "the right to the city," which encompasses substantive as well as procedural democracy for ordinary urban citizens. "If you are tired of being asphyxiated by sanctimonious invocations of 'empowerment' and 'stakeholding, ' then you will enjoy this provocative new study by Mark Purcell. With admirable clarity, he exposes the screaming contradictions between neoliberalism's rhetoric and reality, as well as pointing out the brave (if meager) seeds of authentic democracy in our public life." - Mike Davis, University of California-Irvine "Mark Purcell's illuminating book reveals how neoliberalism is transforming and corrupting urban spaces today. And for this illness he prescribes democracy as cure, both analyzing what democracy can mean today and demonstrating how people are already constructing democratic attitudes and democratizing movements in our cities to combat neoliberalism." - Michael Hardt, Duke University

Martin Horak. Governing the Post-Communist City: Institutions and Democratic Development in Prague. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. xii + 270 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8020-9328-8. Reviewed by Carlos Nunes Silva (Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning , University of Lisbon) Published on H-Urban (October, 2010) Commissioned by Alexander Vari Institutional Change and Local Government Performance in Prague In Governing the Post-Communist City Martin Horak examines and assesses the performance of democratic local government in the first decade of post-communist Prague (1990-2000). In his analysis, Horak considers, among other dimensions, the process through which policies are produced, the degree of openness in the policy process, the ability to govern systematically, and the input from societal actors. The decision to use a local case and a holistic perspective to study post-communist politics proves wise as it allows a better understanding of post-communist transformations than would have been possible through a national case study. The book is organized into six chapters focused on two main research questions: 1) what impacts did the nature of the decision-making environment have on the behavior of political leaders in early post-communist Prague; and 2) what were the longer-term effects of this decision-making behavior? Horak argues, in the first case, that Prague's local politicians reacted to their unstable and institutionally incoherent environment by seeking simple, short-term solutions in key areas of urban policy. In the second case, his argument is that increasing returns processes were responsible for the maintenance of Prague's mix of institutional forms, which were created by decisions taken during the early post-communist period. Two different policy areas are examined: freeways construction and the management of Prague's historical center. In chapter 1, Horak offers an introductory account of institutional changes and governme

This paper describes the work of an alliance formed by three civic organizations in Mumbai to address poverty - the NGO SPARC, the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, a cooperative representing women's savings groups. It highlights key features of their work which include: putting the knowledge and capacity of the poor and the savings groups that they form at the core of all their work (with NGOs in a supporting role); keeping politically neutral and negotiating with whoever is in power; driving change through setting precedents (for example, a community-designed and managed toilet, a house design developed collectively by the urban poor that they can build far cheaper than public or private agencies) and using these to negotiate support and changed policies (a strategy that develops new "legal" solutions on the poor's own terms); a horizontal structure as the Alliance is underpinned by, accountable to and serves thousands of small savings groups formed mostly by poor women; community-to-community exchange visits that root innovation and learning in what urban poor groups do; and urban poor groups undertaking surveys and censuses to produce their own data about "slums" (which official policies lack and need) to help build partnerships with official agencies in ways that strengthen and support their own organizations. The paper notes that these are features shared with urban poor federations and alliances in other countries and it describes the international community exchanges and other links between them. These groups are internationalizing themselves, creating networks of globalization from below. Individually and collectively, they seek to demonstrate to governments (local, regional, national) and international agencies that urban poor groups are more capable than they in poverty reduction, and they also provide these agencies with strong community-based partners through which to do so. They are, or can be, instruments of deep democrac

Due to request of delaying the submission by several authors, the deadline of "Cities, Technologies and Planning" (CTP 12) for submitting full paper has been extended to 28 February, 2012.  Due to request of delaying the submission by several authors, the deadline of "Cities, Technologies and Planning" (CTP 12) for submitting full paper has been extended to 28 February, 2012. "Cities, Technologies and Planning" CTP 12   http://www.unibas.it/utenti/murgante/ctp_12/descr.html in conjunction with The 2012 International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications (ICCSA 2012) June 18th  - June 20th, 2012 Federal University of Bahia , Salvador de Bahia, Brasil  http://www.iccsa.org/ Description 'Share' term has turned into a key issue of many successful initiatives in recent times. Following the advent of Web 2.0, such positive experiences based on mass collaboration generated "Wikinomics" have become "Socialnomics", where "Citizens are voluntary sensors". During the past decades, the main issue in GIS implementation has been the availability of sound spatial information. Nowadays, the wide diffusion of electronic devices providing geo-referenced information have resulted in the production of extensive spatial information datasets. This trend has led to "GIS wikification", where mass collaboration plays a key role in main components of spatial information frameworks (hardware, software, data, and people). Some authors (Goodchild, 2007) talk about "Volunteered Geographic Information" (VGI), as the harnessing of tools to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic information provided by individuals voluntarily creating their own contents by marking the locations of occurred events or by labeling certain existing features. not already been shown on map. The term "neogeography" is often adopted to describe people activities when using and creating their own maps, geo-tagging pictures,