16/04/2024
CFA!! Of CRG’s flagship programme-
The CRG with IWM Vienna is organising a conference on “City as the Southern Question” on 13-14 November 2024 in Kolkata. Please find the concept note of the conference below as also in the attachment!
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“The pre-eminence of cities as sites of human history is inextricable and so are the instances when
cities metamorphosed themselves as characters acting on the formalisation of orders and
institutions that shape our world and the cities in it presently. The rise of Urban Studies as an
academic field speaks of the importance of cities. However, the emergence of modern cities, the
ones that we see and live at now, has much to do with the rise in a multitude of factors. Over the
years, scholarship on the emergence of cities has focussed on various aspects of their growth.
Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England, squarely links the city with the condition of
the working class; Walter Benjamin talks of cities as a place of desire of commodities produced
by capitalism; Henri Lefebvre terms cities as ‘produced space’; postcolonial studies look at cities
as sites of the politics of the governed and so on and so forth. The culmination of all these
perspectives leads to what is now called the ‘urban turn’. Cities today conjure up the ‘people’ the
‘mass’ and the ‘multitude’ and these are sites of investment and logistical services providing
multi-functional services like acting as trading marts, converging points of mega infrastructure
projects, sites of specialised services, haven for refugees and migrants, and centres of
administrative management, besides functioning as venues of parliamentary-democratic politics
notwithstanding the impact of their location and the controls of regional geography.
Cities, thus, are an amalgamation of too many factors at play, the understanding of which
requires a multipronged approach. Cities are now living monsters. They suck anything and
everything including human life. As if, they do not need the countryside. They do not require
hinterlands. As if, they have no pre-history or history. Yet the discussion on cities often fail to
face frontally this unprecedented phenomenon of the city becoming a part of human history. We
now have different categories of cities—port cities, steel cities, car making cities, smart cities,
railway towns, trading towns, tourism hubs, capital cities, etc. But various categories of cities
were there earlier too. Some probably became less vibrant in the course of time, while some new
were added. The question still remains, what drives the hyper growth of some cities of the global
South today? What is its broader significance?
The genesis of cities is crucial to understanding contemporary political and economic orders. As
the world grapples with uncertain challenges exacerbated with the threats of climate change,
disease outbreaks, diminishing resources, etc., it becomes crucial to study cities for what they are
becoming now. It is no accident that of the twenty largest (most populous) cities of the world,
seventeen are from the non-Western world. The other three in this league are Tokyo, Osaka, and
New York City. The U.N. designation of a city includes a mixture of city proper, metropolitan
area, and urban area and these huge urban holdings are evidence that cities are pushing growth
today economically and demographically—worldwide and nationally. The important rise of
global Southern cities now calls for the attention of scholars and public policy analysts working
on Southern histories and their global significance. As the cities are in a constant state of
‘becoming’, it is also important to talk of how the futures of these will look like.
Antonio Gramsci’s unfinished note ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (1926), known
simply as ‘The Southern Question’ sheds light on the geopolitical context of the problematic of
the politics and culture in the Mediterranean region at large, a region which can be conceived of
as an expression of the larger construct, now referred to as the Global South. While the Southern
cities are now integral part of world capitalism, yet they carry the marks of Southern
globalisation and the lineage of the colonial time. Large Southern urban concentrations are
islands of industry, services, and development—working at the same time as giant branches of
Northern corporate capital and determining the grotesque, unbalanced structure of Southern
economies. Their role as logistical hubs (which is why they are often port cities) is therefore no
accident. In this sense, the Gramscian hypothesis may have to be little modified in order to
understand the nature of the ‘Southern urbanisation’ of our time and its crucial role in twenty-
first century globalisation.
The Conference on City as the Southern Question (13-14 November 2024, Kolkata) aims to
talk of cities and the questions that need to be asked and thought of by taking into consideration
Gramsci’s ‘The Southern Question’. The Calcutta Research Group (CRG) in collaboration with
the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, invites papers from academicians, scholars,
researchers and practitioners on the following themes (but not limited to):
• Urban Future(s)
• Urban Care, Protection and Responsibility
• Urban Space and Civic Organisations
• Diseases and Public Health
• Urban Planning and Logistics
• City, Refugees, Migrants and the Stateless
• Urban Violence and Justice
• City, Climate Change and Sustainability
• The City in Literature, Films, Plays and Popular Culture
Submit the application with an abstract (500-600 words), a title and institutional affiliation by 15
May 2024 at https://forms.gle/MF5D5RJ2xS1oRkvi7
*Selected participants will be notified once the selection process is over following which full
papers would be due by 12 October 2024. To facilitate participation in the conference, CRG will
only be able to provide accommodation in Kolkata (Check-In: 12 November 2024; Check-Out:
15 November 2024)”.
Queries with the subject line “Annual Conference 2024” may be sent to [email protected] with a copy to [email protected]