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Schedule and Format

The three key themes of the Rethinking Centres and Peripheries research seminar series are:

1) Small Cities in the Big Society 25/01/2013 ReCAP 1 Program (PDF , 88kb)(Centre for Urban Research, University of York), January 2013 -  Slides now available 

The first seminar will examine the consequences of economic austerity in previously ‘resilient’ non-metropolitan centres regarding their relevance to the national and international economy. It will ask how these cities are responding to austerity at the level of civil society and local government and whether there may be a ‘goldilocks syndrome’, which helps to explain why mid-range/middle-income urban centres are better able (or ‘just right’) to weather the economic storm than larger metropolitan cities. As an example of an ‘ordinary city’, York reveals surprising levels of super-local connectivity and an increasingly significant foreign-born population - its geography, the skill and education level of its population and the relative lack of concentrated poverty make York an ideal ‘rebalancing’ candidate city. But what are the cultural and economic ‘limits to growth’ and do small cities really have the social capital required to take up the slack from public divestment in their key services?

2) Vulnerabilities in the ‘Core’ 31/05/2013 ReCAP Vulnerabilities in the Core Program (PDF , 575kb) Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) at Goldsmiths, University of London. May 2013. This seminar is concerned with the changing landscape of East London and the Olympic legacy where raised public expectations over social housing, transport and other infrastructure improvements have implications for core/periphery spatial imaginaries and the ways in which cities are lived alongside them. This is seen in the drift of the City of London eastwards and the consequent ‘extension’ of the financial centre and the bubbles of art and cultural production in East London that co-exist with it. The second comes from the enhanced ‘superdiversity’ of East and South East London. Where does this leave core/periphery thinking? What people, objects and so on circulate along these routes and how might we best conceptualise these heaving mosaics? Are these spaces producing new social vulnerabilities and what forms do these take?

3) Cities, Resilience and Regeneration 15/11/2013, Global Urban Research Unit, University of Newcastle, November, 2013. The final seminar will explore connections between the resilience and ‘regeneration’ of contemporary cities, especially in the north-east of England. Key themes to be addressed here include: sustaining consumption and public-sector-driven urban economies – especially in the UK peripheries—in a world of radical austerity; linking the latest thinking on sustainable regeneration with wider concepts of urban resilience in a world of rapid climate change, sea-level rise, biodiversity collapse and resource exhaustion; and drawing on the latest innovations in critical urban theory about questions of urban, infrastructural, ecological and human security, as well as demographic ageing, to sustain new urban and policy thinking in a ‘post-regeneration’ world.

ReCAP Newcastle (MS Word , 13kb)