The 10^th Congress of the Association of Geographical Societies in Europe (EUGEO 2025) will take place from 8-11 September 2025 in Vienna. Hosted by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, it seeks to analyse and discuss Geographies of a Changing Europe. The Call for Abstracts is currently open, inviting contributions to diverse sessions, including the 42 sessions as part of the Urban Studies Track, which have been curated, among others, by Kerstin Krellenberg as member of the Scientific Committee.

Together with Yimin Zhao from Durham University, Julia Wesely will host session 204 titled “Looking at the overlooked urbanities: People, practices and left-behind cities”. The session focuses on the implications of being (in) an intellectually and/or politically left-behind urban area to uncover experiences of neglect, overlookedness, and (lack of) attention. It works with the term overlooked urbanities as a heuristic to examine why and how different people, places, and practices remain intentionally or unintentionally marginalised, off-the-map and under-theorised in urban research and policy making (see also, Nugraha et al. 2023, Ruszczyk et al. 2020), and with what consequences.

The session is part of an ongoing research engagement as part of the Overlooked Cities Collective https://www.overlookedcities.org/

It invites presentations that (re-)direct the gaze towards these overlooked urbanities. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• the political and economic mechanisms making overlooked urbanities, and their everyday implications for people, practices and places that are “left-behind”;
• Social, cultural and environmental implications of being labelled/declared as left-behind (and similar terminologies);
• Gaps in European policy agendas and programmes addressing left-behind urban areas (e.g. in the frame of cohesion, exnovation);
• Local government and civil society networks acting on overlooked urbanities;
• Urban counter-initiatives and bottom-up responses to “balancing” policies;
• Research methods and methodologies to investigate overlooked urbanities, especially through comparative, longitudinal and transdisciplinary approaches.

For more information and to submit your abstract by 20 January 2025, go to https://www.eugeo2025.eu/eugeo-2025-sessions/