8TH URBAN SPACE AND SOCIAL LIFE: THEORY AND PRACTICE
TRANSFORMING URBANITY: People and Cities on the Move
Location: Kuala Lumpur and Penang (George Town UNESCO), MALAYSIA
The United Nations reports that 54 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas. The rise of urban settlement is expected to increase sharply in the upcoming decades. Furthermore, Asia and Africa will experience 90 per cent of that increase. How prepared are cities for significant population growth? Cites are facing unprecedented challenges as social spaces, too, with the increases in ethnic, cultural, and religious diversities. For example, the influx of refugees into Europe from North Africa and the Middle East has added another layer of the complexity to urban life. What is happening to those who remain home? A global trend toward increased human mobility and its consequences demand full attention from policy makers, academics, and practitioners. They must increasingly address issues of resettlement, settlement, community building, and integration within what some call a borderless world. Nonetheless, governments and societies often operate within boundaries and must negotiate the arrival of immigrants (including refugees), and citizens. How do we maintain and create traditions and heritages in light of the influx of new arrivals? Space defined both physically and socially plays an important role in delineating responses to this development.
This conference seeks to illuminate and explore research and expressions of human mobility especially as related to cultural and social aspects. Papers pertaining to human mobility, refugee assistance, heritage formation and preservation (i.e., of both new and existing residents), social cohesion, borderlands issues, historical transformation and maintenance of social space, new community formation and other topics on transnational mobility(ies) would find a welcome audience at this conference.
Papers need not follow a particular methodological orthodoxy and may focus on one or more regions of the world.