2019 RSA Winter Conference Special Sessions

Session organisers: Rhiannon Pugh (Örebro University, Sweden), Taylor Brydges (University of Bern, Switzerland) and Ida Andersson (Örebro University, Sweden)
This session will be hosted by the RSA Network on Gender and Regional Studies, and will be the first academic event organised by the network. The goal of this session is to bring together researchers looking at gender issues within innovation and entrepreneurship broadly defined. We are welcoming a range of perspectives on this topic, and as such, will accommodate theoretical, methodological, or empirical papers. Presentations can be grounded in gender theory, or can simply be using gender as a lens through which to examine pertinent issues in regional studies. We welcome presentations dealing with gender issues from a  wide range of locations and sectors and aim to build a welcoming and inclusive session. We will organise some informal networking events linked to this session so that individuals who are interested in participating in our gender network can find out more about our plans for the next two years and become involved.

Session organisers: Fulong Wu (University College London, UK) and Fangzhu Zhang (University College London, UK)
While the geography of city and regional development in China has been extensively studied, its financial processes, in particular financial instruments and actors, are not fully understood. With an emerging literature on the financialization of housing and the financial turn in governance in advanced market economies, we call for papers to investigate the financial aspects and processes of city and regional development in China. this special session particularly welcomes researches on the financial involvement in China’s housing, land, and infrastructure development, the use of financial instruments to convert the built environment into investment opportunities, in addition to well-studied ‘land finance’, conventional housing mortgage, real estate finance, and new forms of financial instruments such as PPPs and the financial impacts on the national, local and household economies such as local government, development industries and households debts.

It is generally agreed that the systems of production and consumption of energy require rapid transformation, yet the social and spatial implications of such energy transitions are still only partly understood. Rapidly evolving industries must navigate changing political landscapes and institutional settings, often against a background of spatial inequalities. Alongside the availability of resources, the heterogeneity of energy transitions stems from the variety of subnational governance arrangements as well as existing socio-spatial patterns of interaction.
These ongoing processes of adaptation and co-evolution provide rich ground for the testing and development of theoretical concepts of transitions and regional development. However, do existing frameworks adequately explain the new realities that are being encountered by ‘transitions in action’? What can be learnt from situating energy transitions within subnational regions?
Considerations of multi-scalarity and relatedness give way to new research questions: How do national, European and global processes impact regional energy transitions? Does the introduction and development of new energy industries interrelate with the wholesale transformation of regions towards sustainable patterns of production and consumption? How do place-bound processes of transitions relate to one-another?
The session organisers invite empirical and conceptual contributions, that are quantitative or qualitative approaches. If you are interested in presenting at this session, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words via the RSA Portal by 19^th August 2019. If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact Laura Norris (NorrisLF@cardiff.ac.uk).

Session organisers: Fumi Kitagawa (University of Edinburgh, UK), Ben Spigel, (University of Edinburgh, UK), Dan Prokop, (Cardiff University, UK) and Cristian Gherhes (University of Sheffield, UK)
Entrepreneurial ecosystems have emerged as one of the most popular new economic development policies in the last decade, and has become a major focus for entrepreneurship research. However, neither research nor policy has given sufficient recognition to ‘place’. In view of geographical differences in the strength of entrepreneurial ecosystems, “one-size fits all” and “top-down” approaches to the ecosystem model are inappropriate and ineffective and risks widening existing disparities across regions and localities.
A more granulated understanding of the heterogeneous nature of places, ecosystems and the complex interactions between actors and their networks across a wide range of contexts is required. In the light of this, the proposed session seeks to better understand the challenges of researching diverse and dynamic configurations of ‘place-based’ entrepreneurial ecosystems and the different roles played by the variety of actors involved. We aim to understand institutional factors behind heterogeneous ‘place-based’ ecosystems both in terms of conceptual frameworks and research methodologies, which enhance cross-ecosystem learning processes.
Papers from a wide range of geographical contexts are welcome. We welcome conceptual frameworks and topics that encompass diversity, aide comparative studies, and innovative methodological strategies.
Full special session call is available here.

Session organisers:

Julie T. Miao (The University of Melbourne, Australia), Xiangming Chen (Trinity College in Hartford, USA) and Xue Li (Fudan University, Shanghai, China)

The aim of this special session is to bring together scholars interested in the various aspects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in an effort to investigate and project a bigger picture of its regional influence. We could encourage multifaceted angles covering prospects from global, national, regional, and city-level analysis. These could include: macro and micro economic analysis of the factors that render some regions/cities more prepared to take part in BRI; detailed and/or comparative case studies to illustrate how opportunities and risks interact to produce varied outcomes of cross-border regional cooperation; geopolitical investigation of how BRI is challenging and reshaping the global order and power structure; operational practice and challenges in places and the counter-measures taken up by different cities and regions; and implications and lessons rendered for policy makers across BRI’s sectors and spaces

Full special session call is available here.

RSA Policy Expo: Enabling Best Practice in Place Based Policy

Our Policy Expo needs your input to help us consider the contribution place-based policy makes to the productivity and well being of national, regional and local economies. This workshop follows on from our first discussion at the annual conference in Santiago De Compostela where our deliberations ranged across a number of issues, including the role of place leadership in communities and the implementation of place based policy, the capacity of governments to bring about change, and the shifting nature of the economy. This discussion builds upon those findings and seeks to focus on three  key questions:

• What are the key messages we, as researchers and scholars, should give to policy makers in order to bring about more productive policies and reduce spatial inequalities?
• What are the most important questions we should ask of policy makers? Are these questions of broad scale policy settings, or should we instead be focusing on issues of detail and implementation? Where would the guidance of researchers be most productively directed? And,
• Finally, we ask, what is the role of community and the community sector in shaping and delivering place-based policy?

Your thoughts and insights into these important questions are needed. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to share their views, and inform them about the next steps in the journey of this RSA Policy Expo.