Are Hinterlands Just Under Extraction?: Beyond the Logic of Planetary Urbanization and Economization

Recent megaregions, including Greater Seoul and Tokyo, apparently keep expanding to pull more population from hinterlands. Applicating this logic to material and infrastructural aspect, Neil Brenner coined the concept of planetary urbanization in which process all the other resources and spaces are under control and extraction by few top tier megacities. . Then, rather than isolated anomalies, East Asian experience may represent generalizable structural shifts that fundamentally alter institutional power and the spatial distribution in regard of social justice. In an era where "all that is solid melts into air," this kind of transitions heavily impacts infrastructure and resource consumption, requesting us a critical reassessment in terms of promoting climate crisis even more. In sociopolitical point of view, traditional compensatory mechanisms—such as migrant labor and pronatalist incentives—fail to foster genuine societal resilience due to the global exhaustion of migrant stocks. In this critical era, global sociology must treat the planet as a "shared survival unit" marked by "shared vulnerability." Societal success must be decoupled from capital accumulation driven by extractivist capitalism. Against these turbulent transformation, we need a "dialogical sociology" for redefining productivity and promoting grass-rooted communal care. Ultimately, this session seeks to reconstruct public policy through an inclusive, all-age framework rooted in global social justice and human rights respect.
This session welcomes papers on, for example:
• Grassroots efforts in depopulated and disadvantaged area.
• Critical analysis of urban-regional relationship and relatedpolicies
• Critical theorizationon extractivist capitalism and megacity privilege . etc.