In order to broaden the reach of the network, and to give more voice to discourses that have emerged over the past few years, the 2013 gathering of the Private Urban Governance Network will focus on ‘the territorial’ and ‘urban justice’ thus shifting meaning of gated settlements from the familiar notion of gated community to a more generic notion of urban gating.

This conference encourages a wide multi-disciplinary participation in the proceedings and Routledge are interested in publising papers from the conference as an edited book.

Keynote speaker: Professor Saskia Sassen, Columbia University

The conference will follow the well-established pattern of plenary sessions, track sessions and mobile workshops. Abstracts and proposals for sessions addressing the following are welcome:

• The growing impact of finance in managing cities (i.e. interactions between finance and privatization)
• The gating machine (emphasis on the various agents involved including institutions, civil society, the state, developers, various regulators or others)
• Public-private partnerships (PPPs) and BIDs, with a special focus on discourses, representation, public spaces and social order
• Urban social movements, resistances to privatization and commodification of public spaces, urban services and housing / to entrepreneurial urban policies
• Social mobility, sense of place and social stratification in blurred boundaries between public and private realm
• Transitional spaces and appropriation strategies (form the point of view of morphology, architecture, design, political sciences)
• Urban planning, gating and informality
• Urban gating, social justice and the right to the city
• Exclusionary and Inclusionary Practices of Gating and Private Governance
• Politics, with a special focus on services infrastructure, equity, redistribution
• New Methodologies in the study of gated communities and private urban governance