Call for papers for the track on “Material welfare, inequalities and territorial fragilization” at EURA 2022 Conference.

Deadline to send abstracts is 1 March 2022.

The detailed text of the call is as follows:

The growth of inequalities in urban areas has been accelerated and amplified by COVID-19 pandemic that has resulted in the impoverishment of sections of the population that were previously above the poverty line. Reduced employment opportunities, particularly for temporary workers and the small self-employed, have also made parts of cities that were not previously considered peripheral more fragile and made previously non-peripheral people vulnerable. The pandemic has also highlighted the many shortcomings and fragmentation of local health and social services, of schooling ones and, more generally, of material welfare and welfare policies. We are faced with a changed framework in which it is necessary to rethink urban policies, adapting them to the changes that have taken place and possibly improving them in the light of the challenges that await us today and in the near future.

This track welcomes contributions that address the following questions (but others can also be included):

• How do social and spatial inequalities manifest themselves today in urban contexts?
• How and to what extent peripheries have changed?
• Is there a new socio-spatial fragility of significant sections of the population?
• What actions are needed to tackle these phenomena in a structural and coordinated manner?
• Is it possible to imagine bottom-up forms of welfare which envisage the involvement and participation of citizens?
• How and in what direction should policies to support material welfare be developed? In which fields?
• What welfare policies are needed today to reduce old and new socio-economic inequalities?