CITICON is an IPR network concerned with understanding the implications of urbanisation, including issues of rapid urban growth in many developing countries. The international network aims to promote exchange and learning between researchers and policy-makers in cities around the world and to develop an active network on the theme.

The event, held this Thursday and Friday (9-10 October) in collaboration with the Catholic University of Argentina, is the third in a series of meetings for the CITICON network. Similar events have taken place previously in Abuja, Nigeria and in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Commenting on the event, CITICON coordinator Dr Roy Maconachie said: "The third CITICON workshop in Buenos Aires will prove to be an important international network building activity, drawing together academics from across South America's ’Southern Cone’.

“Focusing on the theme of human development and social inclusion in growing Latin American cities, the event will create important new research-led relationships with partner institutions in Argentina, Chile and Brazil. In doing so, it will also extend the CITICON network considerably, which aims to promote mutual learning and exchange between researchers and policy-makers in cities around the world."

The aim of this week’s workshop is to build a research network around social justice themes in relation to Argentinean cities, and to explore avenues for international research collaboration on urban inequality and marginalization, so as to inform more just and inclusive policies.

CITICON has been established by the IPR with the aim of building a global and interdisciplinary network of scholars whose research is concerned with building sustainable, peaceful cities.

Buenos Aires is the largest Spanish-speaking city in Latin America, with a population of some 13 million people, nearly 40 percent of the country’s population. Between 1986 - 2002, levels of income disparity in the city grew rapidly, resulting in a 35 percent surge in poverty in the Greater Buenos Aires area. An estimated 10 percent of the city’s residents live in shantytowns, with numbers in such settlements rising by 50 percent between 2001 and 2010. Today, Buenos Aires is ranked ‘amongst the most unequal cities in the world’, according to United Nations classifications.

Dr Séverine Deneulin, also from the Department of Social & Policy Sciences but currently on sabbatical at the Catholic University of Argentina added: “The two-day workshop will be a unique opportunity for scholars from different disciplines and institutions to come together to generate new ideas towards a more integral and multi-disciplinary approach to public policy-making. Policy makers are searching for innovative thinking to go beyond the sectorial approach which has characterised so far urban policies in Latin America’s megacities, and which have had a limited success in decreasing urban inequality. This workshop facilitated by the IPR in Bath will play a major role in this.”

To find out more about the CITICON event in Buenos Aires see http://www.bath.ac.uk/ipr/our-networks/citicon/buenos-aires.html.