The fifth edition of Urban ARC, the Annual Research Conference of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, will be conducted between the 14 – 16 January 2021. The theme for this edition is ‘Urban Imaginaries: Past, Present and Future’.

The idea of imaginaries holds a pivotal place in inquiry. Central to the very nature of knowledge production is the imagination of a better world. This central imperative has led to innovative work across disciplines, sectors and scales, pushing the boundaries of our understanding of, and engagements with, the ‘urban’. The idea(s) of urban imaginaries have been manifested in multiple ways and forms – from utopian visions of the Garden City and the City Beautiful movement to the dystopic fictional urban futures of science fiction. They have been invoked as propellers of economic growth (Anand et al., 2014; Glaeser, 2011; Sankhe et al., 2010), as the locus of both environmental destruction and of sustainable futures (Revi and Rosenzweig, 2013; Revi, 2012; Stone Jr., 2012), as sites of opportunity and hope and as places with deep inequality and strife. The role of urban imaginations has been critical to how our cities have taken shape, both past and present – the vision of an Indian city “ unfettered by tradition” (Kalia, 2006: 134) was fundamental to how new capital cities were planned in post-independence India. The fascination, rooted in older histories, with imaging new urban futures and planning new, greenfield settlements is one that endures in contemporary policy as well – mega-infrastructure projects in Asia and Africa use new urban settlements as nodes around which economic development is being driven (Ballard et al., 2017; Watson, 2015; Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, 2007).

While they are linkages to past, present and futures, urban imaginaries are also products of particular moments, contexts and socio-cultural zeitgeists. They hold the collective aspirations for the future as well as the remnants of past aspirations. Cities also bring together a vast range of spatial practices from architecture and planning, employment and labour, to economic growth and environmental sustainability, politics and culture (Huyssen, 2008). Understanding imaginaries, and their deployment in research is then “critical to develop sustainable practices and environments for our collective tomorrow” (Dunn, 2018: 375).

This is particularly critical in the context of a rapidly urbanising Global South. In ‘New Urban Worlds’, Simone and Pieterse (2018) write that the city is continually something to be remade according to new models, new possibilities of generating value, spectacular visions of the built environment but also constantly draw on everyday lived experiences, histories and encounters, remaining powerful objects of imagination, sociality and governance (ibid). They call for a new way of imagining cities, especially those in the South, using new ways of understanding and studying them.

The notion of studying urban futures, then, is as much a methodological challenge as it is a conceptual one. Increasingly, there have been calls for a ‘new urban science’ bringing together not only academics from a range of disciplines, but also practitioners, emphasising that a transdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach is essential to the future of our cities (Acuto et al., 2018; McPhearson et al., 2016). Methodologically, there is also a movement towards increasingly sophisticated predictive modelling approaches that draw on big data as well as a simultaneous call to look at the everyday lived experiences within urban settlements to produce visions of what urban futures can look like (Keith et al., 2020; Simone and Pieterse, 2018).

Research has in some senses grappled with the ways we imagine the space of inquiry itself – the city, and the multiple threads of inquiry that are woven into the cityscape. The idea of urban imaginaries is also interpreted and used in different ways – through the lenses of media and cyberspace, through social movements around land rights and housing, and local embeddedness and global economic networks (Huyssen, 2008). They invoke the idea of utopian visions enshrined in the earliest urban plans (Brenner and Keil, 2006; Lin and Mele, 2005) to more contemporary urban fantasies played out especially in the cities of the global South (Watson, 2015; Watson, 2014; Bunnell and Das, 2010). These imaginaries offer opportunities to interact with other cultures and diasporas, often mediated through cinema, media, and the Internet but also through migration, and movement of labour, travel and tourism. They also find a place in the idea of the spectacle whether in the form of the erstwhile World Fairs, or the more contemporary cultural events like the Olympics that constantly reshape and reimagine our urban spaces (Huyssen, 2008), or indeed through spectacular architecture (King, 2004).

As Lidner and Meissner (2019) suggest, urban imaginaries play an important role in the city space. They “meaningfully interlink the different structures and signs, minds and bodies, facts and subjectivities, actualities and virtualities, economies and ecologies of urban social space” (Meissner and Lindner, 2018: 6). It is in the intersections of these, and multiple other dualities, that the space of the innovative research around the Urban emerges. Urban Imaginaries can help in reconfiguring the socio-spatial politics of cities, intervening in the interconnected fields of urban class politics, gender politics, geopolitics, and eco-politics (ibid).

The contemporary moment in the light of COVID-19 has also thrown up a range of questions regarding the future of cities, the imaginations of what urban areas could and should look like, how they can be made more resilient while continuing to support vibrant spaces for sustainable development. The pandemic has presented challenges to governments, both local and national and highlighted and amplified inequalities in access to health care, social protection services, housing and employment, among others. We recognize that the implications of COVID-19 are not limited to public health, but rather apply to complex inter-connected urban systems. Indeed, research on this needs to speak to questions of inequality, unemployment, social protection, access to services, and engage with questions of not just development, but development embedded with economic, social and environmental justice — questions that are now more relevant than ever.

Debates have also centred around decongestion and reducing density, on the role of digital technology, on the future of work, and on how architecture and design can evolve to envision the ‘new normal’. This has also thrown up questions around reimagining the nature of urban research itself, and the kinds of methodological innovations that may now be needed. For example, Bhan, Caldiera, Gillespie and Simone (2020), call for a re-examination of the ‘monumental’ as a way of thinking about and responding to the pandemic, as doing so tends to obfuscate the everyday ordinary responses to extraordinary times. Instead, they offer the idea of the ‘collective life’ as an analytical category that allows for a reading that looks beyond “…formal actors and institutions, legible landscapes, neatly tabulated data, and linear economic rationalities” (para 13). The current crisis calls for such reimaginations, and keeping this in mind, Urban ARC 2021 will be organising a special track focusing on post-COVID urban futures.

[If your submission speaks directly to this track, please indicate so at the appropriate space in the online application form.]

Dunn (2018) suggests that the role of imagination is fundamental to processes of conceptualisation, envisioning and performing urban futures. Further, “the importance of such creativity extends in other ways to their questioning of reality, reshaping our spatial conceptions or providing expressions of alternatives” (pg. 375). It is in keeping with this centrality of imaginations in both the lived experiences of cities and its peoples, as well as in the research that seeks to understand, define and predict its futures, that Urban ARC 2021 invites papers and panels engaged with relevant questions of the Urban. We encourage submissions from a wide range of disciplinary spaces, and situated in theoretical, methodological or practice-based approaches to the urban. We aim to provide a critical and fruitful space for engagement across themes (ecology, equality etc.), sectors (land, housing, transport, sanitation, ICT etc.), methodologies (textual analysis, engagement with data, in-depth qualitative work etc.) and disciplines (economics, history, technology, politics, media, anthropology, cultural studies, among others) in order to enable an understanding, and harness the potential, of Urban Imaginaries.

Urban ARC 2021 will be held virtually on the Zoom Webinar platform. Sessions will also be live-streamed to the IIHS Facebook and YouTube Channels. Please check the schedule for information on panels, speakers and registration links. For queries write to us at research@iihs.ac.in