The Post-Crash City: Community Centre for Urban Research (CURB), University of York

Places are filling up now for the next Post-Crash meeting to be held in York in December. Full details can be found here: http://www.york.ac.uk/sociology/research/curb/events/2012/post-crash/ [Click on the 'Community' tab]

Massive and rising inequality in urban centres in the west raises the significant question of social cohesion in the face of illegitimate private wealth. The possibility of communal forms, supports and mutuality has been undermined not only by the expansion of various gaps and indicators but also by a developing sense of a social duality that revolves resources and culpability for the crisis conditions present in many urban centres. Points of city resilience are set against those of vulnerability and social frailty, those that have been floated out of or bailed out of errors of financial judgment are more firmly set against those without in contemporary public conversations mediated by a communication infrastructure that was largely absent in previous rounds of capitalist crisis. How can we understand ideas of community, support and social health in the context of this crisis? What purchase and value donotions of collectivity, shared resources and public life hold for modes of community, public and corporate forms of governance?

Keynote speakers: 
Mike Savage, London School of Economics and Political Science and University of York Suzanne Hall, London School of Economics and Political Science

Please submit paper proposals by email to: Dr Simon Parker simon.parker@york.ac.uk

Check www.york.ac.uk/sociology/research/curb fordetails of past and future Post Crash City events.