The New Urbanism and the Making of Sustainable Cities

RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London, 27-29 August 2008: Call for Papers

Session: The New Urbanism and the Making of Sustainable Cities

Organisers: Gesa Helms (University of Glasgow), Gerry Mooney (Open University) and Mike Raco (King’s College London)


This session calls for papers that examine the relationships between the group of ideas loosely known as the ‘new urbanism’ and the planning and development of sustainable cities. For new urbanists, urban policy and planning should actively work towards the creation of new urban designs and spaces in order to facilitate new modes of community interaction and formation. Following a long tradition of such work, the emphasis is on the ways in which urban design can be used to shape the mobility and activities of individuals as much as (excluded) social groups for a wider ‘common good’. In recent times, this mode of planning thinking has become elided with broader sustainability discourses with their visions of social, economically, and environmentally ‘balanced’ urban environments.

This session seeks papers that engage with ongoing debates within social policy, geography, and criminology that are exploring the ways in which social practices and interaction are controlled, governed, and regulated under this new urbanism, and the power relationships and agendas that underpin these changes. For example, many of the debates around law and order policies, punishment, and social control try to capture the social visions, goals and aspirations of ‘bettering’ or civilising urban subjects through urban and social policy initiatives. Research has often explicitly or implicitly taken on Foucault’s governmentality as a theoretical frame for understanding such changes. Yet, what is often absent in such accounts is the use of detailed, systematic empirical evidence that explores in detail the ways in which policy objectives and visions are actually put into practice on the ground.

We, therefore, welcome papers that: explore and assess the ways in which new urbanist planning principles have been developed, mobilised, and rolled-out in recent planning discourses and practices: focus on the interconnectedness of urban, criminal justice and social policies around the New Urbanism; and examine the attempts that have been made in cities to mobilise and encourage particular forms of social interaction and engagement and with what impacts on the urban. Papers that explore the emergence and novelty or such themes in the light of grounded conceptual and empirical work are particularly encouraged.


Please send a 200 word abstract by January 21 2008 to one of the session organisers: Gesa Helms, Department of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow, (g.helms@lbss.gla.ac.uk); Gerry Mooney, Faculty of Social Science, The Open University (g.c.mooney@open.ac.uk); and Mike Raco, Department of Geography, King’s College London (mike.raco@kcl.ac.uk).