The theme proposes a re-engagement with space, place, and scale not as stable or self-evident, but as contested terrains, terrains through which power travels, where meaning is fought over, and where new configurations of governance, belonging, and imagination are constantly in the making.

In much of the scholarship over the last ten years, there has been a strong, and often necessary move toward processual, relational, and networked understandings of the spatial. This shift has allowed for the deconstruction of rigid geographies, encouraged attention to circulations and infrastructures, and foregrounded dynamic notions of mobility. But this fluidity has also, at times, pulled us away from the groundedness of place, from the material weight of location, and from the localised experiences of power, exclusion, and belonging.

This theme draws from Doreen Massey’s understanding that space is “the product of interrelations,” always in the process of being made, and never innocent of power (Massey, 2005). Place, she writes elsewhere, is a “meeting point” of trajectories, not a static locale, but a conjuncture, where stories, policies, and histories intersect (Massey, 1994). Agnew and Duncan’s (1989) multidimensional understanding of place as location (where it is), locale (what material form it takes), and sense of place (how it is experienced and named) remains useful as a way to hold together material, symbolic, and affective registers of spatial life. These framings could offer the ground from which this theme asks contributors to think both conceptually and empirically.

This theme is an invitation to re-anchor space, place, and scale which means, to return to the grounded, the specific, and the located, without doing away with movement, networks, or relationality. It is not a retreat into fixed boundaries, but a reminder that spatial categories are always both lived and imagined, bounded and fluid, and that their meanings are shaped by histories, struggles, and institutional logics. In keeping with a decade of Urban ARC’s conversations, rooted in India and dialoguing with the Global South, we attend to the ephemerality of boundaries and to transitions as not fixed.

If we unpack the category of the urban, it is often assumed to be a knowable, bounded terrain where “urban issues” unfold. Yet what counts as an urban issue today? Outward migration, forced evictions, real estate speculation, algorithmic governance, or data-driven surveillance, all of these issues blur the edges of the city and call into question how we draw spatial boundaries. Similarly, when policy travels from one administrative scale to another, or across regional and linguistic geographies it seems to mutate. It is retranslated, refracted through the conditions of place, and sometimes resisted outright. Language itself becomes a spatialized terrain: something that carries memory, hierarchy, and exclusion, especially in multilingual contexts. In each of these examples, space and place are not neutral settings but arenas of struggle.

Caste, race, and gender are central to this terrain as well. These are not only social formations, but they are also spatialized logics that shape access to land, infrastructure, safety, education, and the right to move or remain. Segregation, redlining, displacement, ghettoization, and spatial stigma are not accidents of space rather they are produced through caste-race-gendered histories of governance, planning, and knowledge-making. In India, for instance, caste is not simply a social category, but an ordering principle of the built environment, structuring who lives where, who cleans what, and who gets counted. Gender, too, conditions spatial access: the ability to loiter, to own, to occupy. Race continues to determine whose life is considered grievable across borders, and whose presence is seen as a threat.

Alongside these, contestations around ecology, environment, and climate are also increasingly shaping spatial configurations, whether through the uneven distribution of environmental risk, the politics of conservation and displacement, or competing claims over land and resources. Media narratives and digital infrastructures further mediate who is made visible, how space is represented, and which bodies or claims are rendered legitimate. Legal regimes, through planning laws, zoning codes, environmental regulation, and citizenship frameworks, play a central role in reproducing and contesting spatial inequalities. These formations together constitute a dense terrain of power and politics through which space is not merely lived, but continuously made and remade.

We write from the urgency of the present, a time marked by violent conflict, surveillance, rising autocracy, and the algorithmic reordering of life. Spatial logics are increasingly shaped by authoritarian regimes, where planning and infrastructure are enmeshed with extraction, data regimes, and political violence. Artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and predictive mapping tools are not just neutral technologies, they are producing new cartographies, new exclusions, and new forms of governance. The idea of territory is being re-coded in real time: from facial recognition borders to remote warfare guided by satellites. These are not metaphors, they are concrete reorganizations of space.

At the same time, migration of workers, students, and refugees alike, has become a political fault line. Borders harden and soften selectively. Citizenship is parsed into categories of precarity. States extend their reach into diasporas, while simultaneously withdrawing rights from those within. The politics of movement and belonging are deeply spatial, deeply scalar.

This theme also centers scale as a site of struggle, not merely a ladder of administrative units, but an imaginary and a method of governance. Scalar hierarchies determine whose knowledge counts, what qualifies as a “national issue,” and where research or policy attention flows. The disciplinary construction of scale is not neutral: how a planner frames scale is different from how an anthropologist, activist, or resident might understand it. In practice, people are constantly moving between looking up to state or global structures and looking down to their immediate, lived realities. This scalar navigation is not smooth, it is fraught, uneven, and sometimes blocked.

Yet within these entangled crises, there are also possibilities for more. As scholars have argued, moments of profound instability can unsettle inherited categories and create space for new forms of solidarity, method, and imagination (Hilbrandt et al., 2025). The reordering of territory and authority does not just happen on the lines of states and capital, it also gets reworked through mutual aid networks, migrant-led movements, climate justice coalitions, and everyday acts of spatial refusal. These moments of crises seem to have illuminated the fragility of institutional systems and have prompted calls for more situated, ethical, and care-oriented forms of knowledge. In many places, community actors are reconfiguring how we understand safety, belonging, and the public, often in direct contestation with both state and market logics.

Another way in which scholars have suggested for making sense of crisis and the way the world is changing is to interrogate how we ourselves are changing, as workers, as citizens, as subjects (Bashovski and Rossi, 2023) These moments of crises, can also become a space for contestation and reconfiguration. If space is being reorganized, it is also being reclaimed. If scale is used to centralize authority, it is also being challenged by transversal solidarities that cut across borders. This theme invites participants to think with these tensions, to trace not only what is lost or seems impossible, but also what is being made possible in the process. As within these crises, people are also building newer solidarities, new ways of imagining belonging, and new practices of care.

A Call to Explore and Reflect

To frame these enquiries, it is important to pause and consider the continuities and movements that underpin how we understand space, place, and scale. As iterated previously, these are not discrete or self-contained categories, but positions along a continuum that stretches from the hyperlocal to the planetary, and from the wild to the mega-urban region. This continuum invites a way of seeing that is both flexible and expansive, where the analytical lens itself can shift in scope, allowing new kinds of connections to emerge across locations and forms. Equally critical is the question of temporality such as the natural cycles or clock-times that mark each scale and give it a distinctive rhythm. Scale, in this sense, is not only spatial but temporal.

A related concern is also how value is produced and circulated across these terrains. The question of valorisation, of how productivity and worth are distributed along economies of scale and scope, opens another entry point into understanding the relationship between spatial and economic hierarchies. These intersections bring into tension questions of scale, scope, and value, revealing how landscapes of production and protection are continuously reconfigured. In this context, space, place, and scale are not simply concepts. They are the infrastructures of imagination and control. This theme invites contributions that speak to these tensions and transformations. It asks:

• How are spatial categories mobilized to govern, to exclude, or to resist?
• What happens when we look up to the national or global and when we look down to the grounded, the embodied, the situated?
• How do institutions and disciplines differently investigate scale and what are the stakes of those conceptual framings?
• What does it mean to study a “local” issue when global capital, transnational policies, and distant infrastructures are always already present?
• How might we think across the hyperlocal to the planetary, or across the wild-to-mega-urban continuum, to trace how urban, ecological, and social processes unfold across connected terrains?
• How do natural cycles, temporal rhythms, and historical legacies shape the felt experience of scale? What forms of time, seasonality, or duration structure how places and regions are lived and governed?
• How is value produced, circulated, and contested across landscapes? What can the study of value chains, economies of scale and scope, and patterns of exchange reveal about the spatial politics of productivity and belonging?

We are interested in themes that reflect on how space, place, and scale are constituted through conflict, through negotiation, and through imaginative struggle. This may include:

• How policy is rearticulated as it moves across regions, languages, and social groups
• How local actors engage with or resist the scalar imaginaries of the state and private enterprise
• How migration, mobility, and exclusion rework our sense of belonging and territory
• How classification systems (urban/rural, legal/illegal, center/periphery) are spatialized
• How climate, displacement, or infrastructural collapse redraw spatial and political boundaries
• How environmental change, conservation, and climate governance reshape territorial claims, access to resources, and spatial justice
• How digital technologies, such as predictive mapping, surveillance systems, and platform infrastructures, reshape spatial experience, visibility, and control
• How different methods and methodologies shape and contest the production of spatial knowledge and the categories through which space is known
• How economic and institutional notions of “economies of scale” influence spatial planning, resource distribution, and infrastructural investment, often justifying consolidation, displacement, or uneven development and complex role of networks in enabling or disrupting scales and scope of it

This theme also encourages reflexive work that interrogates how our own disciplines produce and sustain spatial hierarchies. What are the disciplinary borders that constrain how we think about space and place? How might we reimagine these categories in light of contemporary crises?

This is a call for situated spatial thinking which holds onto complexity, contradiction, and struggle. In tracing the movements of space, place, and scale across disciplines and terrains we hope to foreground not only how these categories function analytically, but how they are inhabited, contested, and reimagined in the worlds we study, and in the world we live in now.

Dates and Procedures

*Urban ARC is free to attend and participate in. IIHS charges no fees for applying or for presenting at the conference if selected. 

Please note that abstracts must be submitted with the following guidelines:

1. Word limit: 1000-1500 words (excluding references) 
2. Full abstract title, author(s) name and institutional affiliation (for all authors) should be included. 
3. Complete end-text and in-text referencing in APA format. 
4. All tables/images/graphs/figures should be numbered, have a title and have sources mentioned below them. Images obtained from an online source need to be open source/CC licensed with proper attribution. 
5. Font: Open Sans; Font size: 11; Margin size: 1-inch 
6. All abstract submissions should be in Word (.docx) format. PDF files are not allowed. 
7. Please do not submit an entire paper without edits if it exceeds 1500 words.

Abstracts not in the prescribed format will not be considered for inclusion in the conference proceedings.

Location

Urban ARC 2026 will be in hybrid format, online on Zoom, and in person at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Sadashivanagar, 2nd Main Road, Bengaluru – 560 080 (map).

Copyright

All copyright for original work will lie with the author. IIHS will use material only with prior permission.

References

Agnew, J. A., & Duncan, J. S. (Eds.). (1989). The power of place: Bringing together geographical and sociological imaginations. Unwin Hyman.
Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. University of Minnesota Press.
Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage Publications.
Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton University Press.
Bashovski, M., & Rossi, N. (2023). Introduction: Political subjectivity in times of crisis. Globalizations, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2023.2186102
Hilbrandt, H., & Ren, J. (2025). Doing urban geography in times of crisis: Introduction to the forum “Urban geography in times of crisis.” Geographica Helvetica, 80(2), 23–29. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-80-23-2025

Over the past decade, Urban ARC has established itself as a critical space for conversations on the urban in India and the Global South. The conference has approached the urban as dynamic, uneven, and marked by contradiction. Across its nine editions, Urban ARC has engaged with emerging scholarship and subsequently created a space for debate and contestation about the evolving discipline of urban studies in India. This tenth edition marks not only a milestone but also an opportunity to reflect on how these provocations have shaped a trajectory of ideas in urban studies.

Since the very beginning, with The City in Transition (2017), the conference has grappled with the city as a site of flux, where political economies, infrastructures, and subjectivities are continually remade. City and Technology (2018) and City and the Region (2019) extended this concern, highlighting both the structural changes underway and the uneven experiences of these transitions across caste, class, gender, and other social hierarchies. In doing so, Urban ARC has attempted to create one of the few sustained platforms in India where questions of marginality and inclusion have been positioned not as peripheral, but as central to understanding the urban condition.

This concern with social difference has also been tied to the role of imaginaries, how the city is conceived, narrated, and aspired to, both by states and by communities. Urban Imaginaries (2021) placed this question at the centre, while Unpacking Marginalities (2024) foregrounded how visions of modernity and development collide with the lived realities of precarity, displacement, and informality. Debates across these years have also been attentive to technology and environment, whether through platforms and data regimes, or through climate risk and repair, showing how urban life is reshaped at multiple scales. When read together, these thematics build toward a sharper reckoning with space, place, and scale, opening up the present edition’s concerns.

In parallel, the conference has repeatedly returned to the question of boundaries, territorial, social, institutional, and epistemic. The Equal Cities (2020) edition foregrounded the role of the regional and the translocal, while Cities in Flux (2023) emphasised the ephemerality of categories and the instability of borders. These discussions have complicated how we define both “urban” and “urban studies,” and extended into questions of scale and place. Together, they reveal how the urban is produced across multiple registers, the household and neighbourhood, the region and the nation-state, the Global South and the world at large. This preoccupation with scale and boundaries underscores the importance of looking at the urban not as a fixed category, but as a site continually constituted through relationships, connections, and contestations.

When we look at these thematic threads together, transitions, equality, marginalities, imaginaries, boundaries, and scales, they mark a trajectory of knowledge that has been collectively forged within the space of Urban ARC. They also reflect the evolving role of the conference itself, which is not only responding to scholarly discourse but also actively shaping debates in India and dialoguing with international scholarship on the urban. Over ten years, Urban ARC has become a space where ideas from the Global South challenge dominant frameworks, producing insights that engage beyond national boundaries.

The 10th edition of Urban ARC thus builds upon these accumulated provocations. By foregrounding the urban as a space of transition and by recognising the ephemerality of boundaries, social, spatial, and conceptual, it invites scholars and practitioners to reflect critically on a decade of conversations while opening up new directions for the future. This conference places Urban ARC as a vital node in the landscape of urban studies in India and a significant interlocutor for global conversations on the city.

This year, the conference will take place from 15 to 17 January 2026, virtually and in person, at the IIHS, Sadashivnagar Campus. The theme for this edition is ‘Contested Terrains: Space, Place and Scale’. This theme emerges directly from the conference’s prior conversations, about transitions and imaginaries, equality and marginality, and the non-fixed, shifting boundaries that organise urban life, positioning Urban ARC as an important node in the landscape of urban studies in India and the Global South.

In our tenth edition, we draw from this legacy and reorient attention to the conceptual categories that underlie much of the debates, discussions and research from earlier editions of Urban ARC. By returning to space, place, and scale not as settled descriptors but as actively produced and contested constructs, this theme invites reflection on the fluidity of the urban. It speaks to earlier discussions on technology, region, ecology, and marginality, while foregrounding the scalar and spatial logics that shape urban policy, infrastructure, exclusion, and resistance. In doing so, it reinforces a decade of Urban ARC as a space to reimagine urban futures, conceptually grounded, politically attuned, and spatially situated, and as an important contributor to urban studies in India and the Global South.