19. Peaceful coexistence and cities of hope: Living together amid urban inequalities

The description and the objectives of the session
In a time marked by deep social, political, and ecological transformations, cities are increasingly confronted with challenges that threaten peaceful coexistence, including segregation, polarization, and inequalities. At the same time, cities are places where hope for living together with differences persists, despite uncertainties, conflicts and fragmentations. Therefore, cities are the primary sites where diverse urban actors negotiate the conditions of peaceful coexistence in everyday life.

This session engages with the conference theme city of hope, through exploring peaceful coexistence in urban spaces, focusing on everyday encounters and their entanglements with wider societal power structures and relationalities. Peaceful coexistence in cities is shaped by social practices, built environment, and institutional frameworks. These processes are deeply influenced by intersectional inequalities and power relations, affecting who is able to access urban spaces, participate in social life, and envision a hopeful urban future. While some forms of coexistence are supported and promoted as desirable, others remain fragile, contested, or actively constrained. Peaceful coexistence is therefore not a harmonious given, but an ongoing, unequal, and often conflictual process, through which hope is both sustained and fractured.

This session aims to bring discussion on peaceful coexistence through the concept of hope. Firstly, we will explore how peaceful coexistence is lived, negotiated, and challenged through the interactions between everyday encounters, urban planning and policymaking. We invite contributions that examine how residents, communities, planners, policymakers, and civic actors foster, manage, or contest coexistence under conditions of inequality, and local and global crises.

Secondly, the session addresses how power relations, intersectional positions, and forms of exclusion shape the possibilities for peaceful coexistence, raising questions about who is included in hopeful visions of the city and who is left at their margins. We ask: What makes coexistence peaceful, for whom, and at what cost? How do urban policies and planning practices enable or undermine the hope for peaceful coexistence? We also invite critical reflections on peace and hope, how they can reinforce or limit one another as well as the capacity to coexist with differences.

Thirdly, we invite methodological reflections on how peace and hope can be studied interconnectedly. We encourage contributions that employ ethnographic, participatory, visual, experimental, or comparative approaches to examine everyday practices, institutional frameworks, conflicts, negotiations, and solidarities that sustain or disrupt coexistence in urban life. How can different methods help capture fragile, situational, and uneven forms of coexistence that point toward more peaceful and hopeful urban futures?

We welcome empirical, conceptual, and methodological contributions that critically engage with peaceful coexistence for inclusive, and sustainable cities. The session seeks to create an interdisciplinary space for dialogue between urban studies, human geography, sociology, peace studies and beyond, enabling conversations between research, policy, and practice. By foregrounding coexistence as a dynamic, relational and contested process, the session contributes to broader debates on how cities can become spaces where people not only live together but actively cultivate hope.

The session will be held only in English. Therefore, we kindly ask participants to submit their proposals/abstracts in English.