2025 ICUA – Call for Participation

The Urban Affairs Association (UAA) invites proposal submissions for papers and research briefs as well as panel, colloquy, and roundtable sessions to stimulate thinking and re-thinking of urban affairs as well as to widen intellectual and professional networks. Deadlines and the full call for participation can be found here.

Topic:

Urban Concentration: challenges to equity, mobility, and sustainability

Overview:

As a global urban center, Vancouver provides a dynamic yet unique context for an interdisciplinary conversation within the International Conference on Urban Affairs. It is a city experiencing rapid growth and concentrated development, as well as crises of precarity, poverty, and inequality. Shaping this experience, conflicting understandings of desirable urban change are continually juxtaposing different ways of knowing and being in the city. While Vancouver has embraced the quality of ‘concentration’ that American Canadian urbanist Jane Jacobs recognized as one of the four principles of good urban form, the city’s development trajectory provides lessons of the contradictory results of applying this principle.

Vancouver’s trajectory follows from early efforts on unceded Native land to transform the spoils of resource exploitation into urban wealth. Over time, these efforts came to focus on a concentrated urban form emphasizing socio-economic mixing and mobility alternatives. This bore the fruits of vaunted livability and cosmopolitan status. However, the concentrations brought contradictions. For example, the push for unfettered private development contradicted the adherence to strong public institutions; rising vulnerabilities contradicted the narrative of livability and opportunity for immigrants; high consumption levels contradicted the longstanding goals of maintaining climate and ecological integrity; evidence of injustice and racism contradicted the promise of an open, diverse communities. Due to these simmering contradictions, trade-offs have become endemic to urban concentration in Vancouver. Recent tensions have included those between housing action and climate action, gentrification and preservation, innovation and tradition, colonialism and reconciliation. Concentrated efforts to resolve these contradictions have resulted in more distractions than solutions. The 2025 Local Host Committee welcomes fellow urbanists to expose and explore the ways that the contradictions of concentration shape cities and the lives of people within them.

Topic Categories:

Special Track: Beyond Land Acknowledgements: The Struggle for Native Peoples’ Rights to the City

• Challenges and Strategies for Advancing First Nations’ Rights in Vancouver
• Promoting the Rights of Urban Indigenous Peoples Across the Globe

Cities as Global Landscapes

• Cities as Conflict Zones, Reclaiming and Rebuilding
• Cities in Global Networks (e.g., finance, trade, investment, communications)
• Cities as Migration Centers; Urban Demographic Change; Immigration Rights & Border Politics in Cities

Resilient Cities – Planning and Policies

• Arts, Culture, Preservation and Heritage in Sustainable Cities
• Disaster Planning and Management
• Environmental and Energy Policy Challenges in Cities and Urban Green Futures
• Infrastructure, Transport, Services, Accessibility and Mobility in Urban Areas
• Urban Design, Land Use, Public Space, Growth Management
• Urban Health (e.g. care crisis and disease); Quality of Urban Life
• Urban Technology, Media and Communications, Smart Cities, Digital Divides

Rights to the City

• Community Development, Gentrification, Neighborhood Change
• Civil Rights of Urban Residents; Native Rights
• Economic and Social Exclusion by Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Identity, Age
• Urban Housing Affordability, Financialization and Market Dynamics, Homelessness
• Urban Education, Labor and Employment in Cities, Urban Entrepreneurship
• Urban Income/Wealth Disparities, Poverty, Wage Gaps; Food Insecurity
• Urban Technology, Media and Communications, Smart Cities, Digital Divides
• Urban Violence, Public Safety Challenges

Democracy Under Stress: Institutions and Governance

• Urban Economic Development Strategies; Urban Fiscal Policies
• Metropolitan and Regional Dynamics; Development Politics
• Urban Public, Private and Non-governmental Sector Roles; Philanthropy and the City
• Urban Political Activism, and Urban Social Movements