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Vertical Peripheries: Housing and Urban Transformation at the Metropolitan Margins
August 21–22, 2025 | Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
As part of the SSHRC-funded research collaboration between York University (Toronto, Canada) and CIDER at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), titled Vertical Peripheries: Planning and Citizenship in Colombia’s Commodified Periurban Housing Towers, we invite advanced and early-career scholars to participate in a two-day workshop to be held at Universidad de los Andes on August 21–22, 2025. The workshop will explore the emerging phenomenon of vertical peripheries — high-rise housing developments located on the expanding edges of cities, particularly (but not exclusively) in the Global South. The workshop will also serve as a platform to shape contributions for a forthcoming special issue in a high-impact academic journal dedicated to this theme.
Over the past two decades, verticalization has become a central strategy in mass housing programs, promoted as a response to housing deficits, land scarcity, and informal urban expansion. This model has produced a distinctive urban form: large-scale, often state-subsidized towers situated on the urban fringe, frequently on former rural, informal, or environmentally sensitive land. These vertical peripheries reflect planning logics that promise formalization and modernity, while relocating low-income populations further from jobs, services, and political visibility.
Far from marginal in function, however, vertical peripheries are increasingly central to how cities manage land, housing demand, and the political project of inclusion. At the intersection of housing policy, modest public investment, and speculative development, they produce new geographies of density, ecological stress, and social fragmentation. Framed as instruments of integration, they often reproduce inequality—delivering legal tenure without access, infrastructure without services, and housing without full urban citizenship. Therefore, the effects of this type of housing on the well-being of the people who live there are mixed.
This workshop approaches vertical peripheries not simply as policy failures or technical challenges, but as contested terrains where planning, capital, and everyday life collide. These are sites of both state intervention and resident improvisation—zones of aspiration and struggle, where people redefine what it means to live, and live well, at the urban margins.
We welcome contributions that explore these tensions across diverse contexts and that critically examine vertical peripheries as sites of urban transformation, governance, and everyday negotiation. Selected papers will be considered for inclusion in the special issue Vertical Peripheries: Housing and Urban Transformation at the Metropolitan Margins, with an eye toward deepening comparative, theoretical, and empirical conversations around this global (yet uneven) phenomenon.
This workshop is especially intended for those in the final stages of their research projects. Participants are expected to submit a complete draft of their contribution by December 15, 2025.
Submission Guidelines
We welcome proposals for paper presentations:
- Abstracts (~400 words) should include a brief description of the research question, theoretical framework, background, methods, and relevance to the workshop theme.
- Please include a brief bio (maximum 100 words) along with your abstract.
- Submit proposals to Luisa Sotomayor at sotomay@yorku.ca and Clara Gómez clara24@yorku.ca by July 1, 2025.
- Limited travel support may be available for participants based in Latin America or the Caribbean.
The workshop will be conducted in both English and Spanish, with simultaneous translation provided. - Hotel accommodation and meals will be provided for all accepted participants during the workshop.
Organizers
Luisa Sotomayor, Associate Professor and Director, CITY Institute, York University, Toronto. sotomay@yorku.ca
Lina Brand Correa, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change,York University, Toronto. brand@yorku.ca
Adriana Hurtado Tarazona, Associate Professor, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá a.hurtado10@uniandes.edu.co
Friederike Fleischer, Associate Professor, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá. f.fleischer406@uniandes.edu.co.
With the support of:
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
- Interdisciplinary Centre for Development Studies – CIDER, Faculty of Social Sciences, Universidad de los Andes
- The City Institute at York University
- Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University
