Cultures, Communication, Communities Conference

Re-Imagining the City : Legacies, Challenges, Possibilities

30 November – 2 December 2023

Tāmaki Makaurau | Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

The conference will be a major transdisciplinary gathering of national and international researchers and leaders, from universities, local government, community organisations and industry, whose work intersects with the city’s symbolic and material import and impact on communities within and beyond its limits. Throughout history cities have served as crucibles for sociocultural revolution and transformation, intellectual exchange and the circulation of ideas, and, in recent centuries, the democratisation of symbolic capital. Yet they have also been places that limit access to knowledge and power, and built on dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands. While scholarship on cities is burgeoning, the conference, Aotearoa’s first on such multiple facets, will provide a unique contribution to the field. As scholarship on Asia-Pacific cities experiences a renaissance, it offers a lens into an increasingly urbanising world and as a set of sites where new theoretical formulations of the urban are produced.

Much of the interest in Asia-Pacific’s urban communities has arisen over recent decades through the lens of the “global city” concept. Newly acquired economic power helps global cities grow the networks, financial power and confidence to create novel forms of international political organisation in response to challenges such as the C40 network with climate action and the need to develop new models of democracy. Our conference wishes to highlight scholarship on these forms of organisation, and the cultures and communicative practices that bring them together. Cities such as Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland, at the geographical and metaphorical intersection of Asia and the Pacific and with its Indigenous and multi-ethnic, multilingual communities, face particular conundrums but are also well-placed to bring diverse knowledges and experiences together in productive dialogue.

Conference Committee members 

Prof. Christine Arkinstall (European Languages and Literatures)

Prof. Gary Barkhuizen (Applied Language Studies)

Dr Louisa Buckingham (Applied Language Studies)

Dr Tatjana Buklijas (Global Studies)

Prof. Martin East (Applied Language Studies)

Dr Ian Fookes (Academic English; Asian Studies)

Dr Mi Yung Park (Asian Studies)

Kimberley Rothville (PhD representative)

Dr Bingjuan Xiong (Communication)

Donna Rhyse Dacuno (Events and Conference Planner)