Workers, Suburbs, and Labor Geography
Call for article proposals for an International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) thematic issue on Workers, Suburbs, and Labor Geography
A large proportion of the world's workers live in communities on the outskirts of cities. In different places, such communities take very different forms. Many European cities (Paris, Moscow, etc.) long have been ringed by working-class suburbs composed of dense, high-rise dwellings. In the United States, Canada, and Australia, workers have been part of a massive process of suburbanization characterized by low density, single-family dwellings, and automobile dependence. In Latin America and Africa, massive self-built communities of shacks and shanties surround major urban settlements (a phenomenon that occurred in some North American cities during the early 20th century). In India, squatter settlements have been interspersed in middle and upper-class neighborhoods.
There has been no systematic, comparative study of working-class suburbs and their meaning for labor movements and working-class politics, in spite of their growing importance. ILWCH proposes to publish a thematic issue which would begin such an investigation. It also would present an opportunity for ILWCH to engage with the growing body of work by geographers interested in the relationship between labor and the spatial dimension. Articles for the ILWCH issue might address such questions as: how have patterns of working-class suburbanization (or, more generally, working-class residence on the edges of cities) varied from country to country? How has suburbanization impacted working-class culture, social activism, politics, and industrial relations? What do labor movements look like in suburbanized worlds? How have spatial divisions intersected with ethnic and racial divisions? How do spatial issues force us to rethink paradigms of labor and working-class history? How do different disciplines (history, geography, sociology, anthropology, political science) approach issues of spatial organization, and what can scholars of working-class history learn from each? We welcome proposals dealing with a single country (or city) as well as those that address thematic questions transnationally.
Interested authors should submit a one-page proposal to:
International Labor and Working-Class History
Center for Studies of Social Change
New School for Social Research
80 Fifth Avenue, Fifth Floor
New York, NY 10011
or by e-mail to