Call for Papers – Participatory Knowledge Co-production with Older Adults in Urban Contexts

Journal: Urban Studies

Special Issue: Participatory Knowledge Co-production with Older Adults in Urban Contexts 

Guest Editors: Anna Urbaniak (Jagiellonian University, Poland) and Anniriikka Rantala (Tampere University, Finland) 

Cities worldwide are confronting demographic ageing, deepening social inequalities, and growing demands for more inclusive and democratic urban governance. Participatory and co-production approaches have gained prominence as ways of engaging residents in shaping urban environments and policies. Yet older adults are still too often positioned as passive beneficiaries of services and age-friendly interventions rather than as active co-producers of urban knowledge. 

This Special Issue repositions older adults as experts by experience and examines how participatory knowledge co-production can inform urban governance, neighbourhood development, and inclusive place-making. It treats participation not as a normative ideal but as a contested, mediated, and situated process shaped by power relations, institutional arrangements, and infrastructural conditions. 

The Special Issue is an outcome of the PAAR-Net COST Action and already brings together a committed set of invited contributions spanning the UK, the Netherlands, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, South Africa, and transnational Europe–Southeast Asia connections. 

The Open Call 

We now invite a limited number of additional papers through this open call.  

This call is specifically oriented toward contributions from the Global South — particularly Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East — which are currently underrepresented in the committed paper set. In addition to broadening geographical scope, we especially welcome contributions on: 

• Intersecting inequalities in participatory urban ageing (e.g. how gender, class, disability, migration, and neighbourhood conditions shape who participates and how); and 

• Methodological innovation in participatory and co-productive research with older adults. 

This mechanism keeps the Special Issue anchored in the network’s collaborative work while substantially broadening its geographical and thematic reach.  

We welcome submissions from any discipline or inter-/intra-disciplinary approach, including urban studies, sociology, gerontology, geography, planning, architecture, public health, and social policy. Empirical papers must be theoretically framed; descriptive local case studies alone will not be accepted. Each paper is expected to make an original conceptual contribution to debates central to Urban Studies. 

Submission Guidelines 

Only papers with pre-approved abstracts will be included.

Please submit a Word document named LastName_of_FirstAuthor_proposal_for_SI_in_US.docx (e.g. Smith_proposal_for_SI_in_US.docx) containing: 

• A structured abstract (250 words) with title, research purpose/questions, methods, major findings, and conclusions; 

• An 80–100 word explanation of how the paper fits this Special Issue, with links to prior work published in Urban Studies (https://www.urbanstudiesjournal.com/journal); 

• Five keywords; and 

• Below the keywords, a table of all co-authors listing first name, last name, position, and affiliation. 

No other format will be accepted. 

Abstract deadline: 16 September 2026, 23:59 CET  

Full papers (pre-approved abstracts only): 16 November 2026 

Send submissions to paarnet.volume@gmail.com, with ‘SI2’ at the beginning of the email subject line (e.g. SI2: Abstract submission). Submissions are processed as received, and authors are encouraged to submit ahead of the deadline. 

We look forward to your contributions to advancing the dialogue on participatory knowledge co-production and urban ageing.