The panel seeks to address the categories of gentrification and commoning as two different, but not necessarily opposite attitudes toward the reconfiguration of neoliberal power in Europe and beyond. In doing so, we seek to discuss how post-capitalist imagination is seen to emerge from practices of self-organisation, DIY resistance or community based groups and collectives. We are interested in approaches engaging anti-austerity movements as agents of new political imagination, but which remain aware of the risks of co-option and de-politicisation promoted by neoliberal institutions and organisations on the ground, often associated with the phenomena of gentrification and neoliberal economies. The panel aims to discuss papers bringing together a geographical focus based on, but not limited to, the socio-historical configuration of power within the context of European urban peripheries as well as the peripheries of Europe. With this we include both the margins of European cities as well as the margins of Europe itself, aiming to promote forms of comparative connections between North and South, East and West. We are particularly interested in how, in different European contexts, institutional politics and social movements redefined the struggle against neoliberal austerity politics.

We accept papers on (but not limited to):
– Responses to the austerity crisis in the peripheries of both Southern and Northern Europe
– Analysis of processes of gentrification in European cities
– Studies of processes of marginalisation in the European peripheries
– Limits and challenges of activists scholarship with urban social movements
– Ethnographies of neoliberal planning and architecture
– Case studies addressing spatialized practices of post-capitalism
– Practices of urban commoning with a focus on sharing, collaborative and solidarity networks in the European city.

Further details about the general conference at:

http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+International+Conference+2016.htm