This year's RC21 conference explores the theme Ordinary cities in exceptional times. The Call for Abstracts to the RC21 conference is now open till the 31^st of January 2022. Interested researchers can submit their abstract to one of 47 panels.

Panel 16 on Housing systems and their implications in the Global North, South, and East is organised by Daria Volkova. Daria is an IPP-EU doctoral student at the Institute for European Urban Studies.

The conference connects the emerging spatial perspective of ordinary cities to the theme of the exceptional time. Ordinary cities, after all, may be going through times perceived as exceptional –like crises– although nothing is exceptional in capitalism, and nothing is ordinary either. However, when theory has unwarranted and usually unintended contextual attachments, its estimations can be seriously biased. The focus on top global cities and mainly on those dominated by neoliberal regulation promotes approaches that consider global forces as the determining factors of urban social futures and demotes those considering the importance of other factors, especially policies aimed at counteracting or at least mitigating the effects of such global forces. Yet, exceptional circumstances (such as crises or disasters) have become the continuous rather that the exceptional driving force of urban governmentalities.

This year's conference welcomes sessions and papers on urban and regional issues perceptive of the not random ways in which concepts and theories travel among different contexts around the world and of the impact of this travelling on the ways we assume what is ordinary and general and what is exceptional and particular.

The 2022 RC21 conference will take place from the 24^th – 26^th of August 2022 in Athens, Greece.