Over the past years, academics and policymakers have re-surfaced and expanded the concept of left-behind places and levelling-up actions to diagnose and address growing socio-spatial inequalities amidst the poly-crisis of climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic and geopolitical and everyday conflicts. In urban research, these concepts have been appropriated, for example, to examine the changes of (former) industrial and manufacturing cities in the UK (Martin et al. 2021) and the impacts of EU structural funds on shrinking German towns (Schlappa 2017). This session aims to facilitate discussions that move beyond the perspectives of economic geography, where the challenges of exacerbating versus reducing inequalities between urban areas have been widely analysed (MacKinnon et al., 2024). Specifically, we want to focus on the implications of being (in) an intellectually and/or politically left-behind urban area to uncover experiences of neglect, overlookedness, and (lack of) attention. We put forward the term overlooked urbanities as a heuristic to examine why and how different people, places, and practices remain intentionally or unintentionally marginalised, off-the-map and under-theorised in urban research and policy making (see also, Nugraha et al. 2023, Ruszczyk et al. 2020), and with what consequences for us to further reflect on.
This session invites presentations that (re-)direct our gaze towards these overlooked urbanities. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• The political and economic mechanisms making overlooked urbanities, and their everyday implications for people, practices and places that are “left-behind”;
• Social, cultural and environmental implications of being labelled/declared as left-behind (and similar terminologies);
• Blind spots in European policy agendas and programmes addressing left-behind urban areas (e.g. in the frame of cohesion, exnovation);
• Local government and civil society networks acting on overlooked urbanities;
• Urban counter-initiatives and bottom-up responses to “balancing” policies;
• Research methods and methodologies to investigate overlooked urbanities, especially through comparative, longitudinal and transdisciplinary approaches.