IV ISA Forum of Sociology (February 23-28, 2021)

559

Transitions in Cities and Challenges of Public Support

Abstract Submissions Closed

RC46 Clinical Sociology (host committee)

Language: English and French

Session Type: Oral

During the past two decades or so, many cities have experienced rapid growth and expansion, amidst transitions in their socio-economic systems and political ecologies. While continued growth and rising prosperity have led to poverty reduction, social inequality has widened within and across income groups/classes as well as compromised the integrity of ecological-environmental systems, especially the declining access to urban public spaces like parks or community centers. Meanwhile, local-national governments have collaborated with the private sector in mobilizing urban governance systems to implement intensive capitalist development projects which have led to the erosion of earlier “greening and nurturing initiatives” of the city like support for parks, day care centers and senior citizens centers, community leisure and sports-related spaces. Intensive capitalist development in partnership with national-local governments drive the prices of land and have led to land use conversion of the public paces/centers to commercial-industrial use, driving the contradictory consequences of these processes to citizen groups/communities’ access to public spaces. In the process, this has led to citizen movements to oppose the conversion of these public spaces for capitalist development and to reclaim these green and nurturing spaces for the community. This session invites submissions or case studies that highlight the contradictions of rapid growth and economic expansion of cities and citizen groups/communities claim to public spaces or nurturing centers. This session also highlights how by integrating concepts and methods from clinical sociology and engaged public sociology can enhance/enrich the outcomes and impacts of citizen movements to reclaim declining urban public spaces.