Urban ARC 2026 | Contested Terrains: Space, Place and Scale
Hybrid format - Online on Zoom and IIHS, Sadashivanagar, Bengaluru - 560 080
Organization: Indian Institute for Human Settlements
The tenth edition of Urban ARC, IIHS’ Annual Research Conference, will take place from 15–17 January 2026, virtually and in person, at the IIHS, Sadashivnagar, Bengaluru. The theme for this edition is ‘Contested Terrains: Space, Place and Scale’.
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.
Tanvi Bhatikar