The Royal Geographical Society with IBG Annual Conference session Urban Violence in Troubled Cities – Towards Comparative Geographies of Hope is co-convened and chaired by Dr Jonathan Rock Rokem, Lecturer in Human Geography. The conference will take place in London between the 27th and 30th August and brings together over 1,800 participants from across the world to advance the discipline and work with many different audiences.
The session brings together a selected group of international case studies from Bogota, Colombia, Johannesburg, South Africa, Dili, Timor-Leste, Jerusalem, Hebron and Beersheba in Israel/Palestine, and rural and urban subnational contexts across sub-Saharan Africa engaging with spatial analysis and urban violence driven by geopolitical regional tensions.
In doing so, the session seeks to start learning from and comparing across different cities, pointing to the growing need to re-think ‘labels’ and ‘concepts’ attributed to cities and neighbourhoods, to better conceptualise and adapt policy and practice to (e.g. ethnic, religious, or LGBTQ) minorities and exposed citizens and non-citizens (e.g. migrants, women, unemployed or homeless persons) in an ever more fractured urban geopolitical reality (Rokem and Boano 2018). The session is particularly interested to develop a joint critical and comparative reading of urban geopolitical violence and spatial analysis in cities from different regional settings.