Abstracts are invited for the ICSSR Sponsored Three-Day International Conference "Urban Metamorphoses: Understanding the Dynamics and Diversity of South Asian Cities" at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal.

*Conference dates: 27 February–01 March 2025

Conference Venue: Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, INDIA

The spatial fabric of the city has been re-conceptualised, built, rebuilt and in myriad ways responding to the necessities of time. Ascribing a single premise to the concept of a city is never possible as the nature, structure, and functioning of cities are diverse and dissimilar. Likewise, defining the city has a scope that is widely spread across a cluster of disciplines like planning and architecture, history, anthropology, heritage studies, sociology, visual arts, literature and cultural studies, innovation and policy research, and others under the rubric of “urban”. With the exponential growth of population in South Asian cities, academic inquiries focus on new settlement agglomerations, migration, precarity and climate crisis, community-based provisions, sustainability, equitable distribution of public and private resources and other economic and cultural trajectories as windows to explore the multilayered reality of the metropolitan landscape, encompassing heterogeneous communities, neighbourhoods and practices. A key intervention in the neoliberal transformation of cities with Smart technologies in the age of climate action also urges for an ecologically sensitive mode of urban dwelling and an acknowledgement of the environmental histories and memories, embedded in spatio-cultural practices, communities and their quotidian lifeworlds. In this context, the question of urban heritage becomes crucial in envisioning sustainable goals that braid the past, present and future in meaningful ways.

In this conference, we aim to gather the multifaceted perspectives on the city-space, which is rapidly growing and reflecting the changing impulse of the region loosely termed South Asia, in relation to the Global South and the world. Simultaneously, the conference also seeks to push the boundaries of traditional scholarship to re-imagine the evolving urban space and the stories they tell by invoking diverse conceptual and artistic apparatuses. It explores the urban heritage and its representation not merely through a collection of “built edifices” but through people and their vernacular traditions, religion, eclectic cultural exchanges, the evolution of foodways, literary conventions, political movements, folk and demotic forms of art and entertainment that define a city’s identity across time. Here, the “urban phenomenon” equally engages with chequered histories of movement and displacement, desires and aspirations of social mobility, as well as the variegated conversations, food and friendship that foster new synergies across the cities in the global South and North.

We welcome submissions on themes including, but not limited to the following:

Ecology, Sustainability and the City-Space

Cultural Dynamics of Cities

Smart Cities and Technological Advancements

Migration, Mobility and Urban Diversity

Gender Dynamics in Urban Spaces

Urban Isolation and the Neo-Liberal City

The Urban Poor and Social Inclusion

Monuments, Architecture and Preservation

Sustainable Heritage

Urban Ruinscapes and Endangered Histories

Sensory Encounters in the City

Affect and the Senses

Sensory Historiography

Foodways and migration

Eateries, coffee houses and urban public sphere

Caste, class and culinary practices

The Subaltern and Public Space

Cultural History of Neighbourhoods

(Post)colonial Cities and its Discontents

Provincial Cities

The Uncanny in the City

Cities in Visual arts/Performative Traditions/Folk art forms

Cities in Modernist/Avant-garde Narratives

Urban Flaneur

Urban Nostalgia

Send your abstracts of 300 words with a title and bio-note to cityconference2025@gmail.com 

For the complete Call for Papers (CFP) and the list of invited speakers, please visit the conference website, https://cityconference2025.com