AHEAD OF THE GAME.
REVERSIBILITY, FRUGALITY AND CARE IN THE CONTEXT OF URBAN TRANSITIONS
GRENOBLE, JULY 3-6 2024
Call for applications EXTENDED until 31 January 2024!
The 2024 AESOP PhD Workshop is an event linked to the AESOP Annual Congress organized by SciencesPo Institute in Paris, in July 2024. Titled “Game changer? Planning for just and sustainable urban regions”, the congress will critically assess the impacts of the Olympic Games and of major infrastructural works in the context of a frugal urban development.
Following a similar approach, the PhD workshop invites doctoral students in urban studies and urban planning to present their work and to discuss the topics of reversibility, frugality and care in spatial planning. Faced with rapid and massive transformations, urban planning practice is compelled to change its core principles. Once land consuming, it must now be attentive to land take dynamics. Once delivering rigid infrastructural projects, it must now cater for increasingly diversified and everchanging needs. Once relying on massive resources, it must now find ways to mend the urban fabric without depleting much. Planners have to look ahead when it comes to buildings inherited from modern times or big events like the Olympic Games and adapt them to the challenges of the future. But how to plan today the inheritance of future generations? Planning differently becomes all the more difficult in a world of emergency and uncertainty, where short-termism, urgency and endless experimentation prevail. Catering for space reversibility, planning with a frugal attitude, caring about humans and non-humans, for the living and non-living… such guiding principles could help to deal with the urban fabric left “after the game”, while planning “ahead of the game”.
Grenoble, as a former Olympic Games host city with a long history of a deep interweaving of citizens movements and local government, constitutes the ideal destination to discuss these topics. It also offers a fertile ground to update the ethodological apparatus and gather in vivo contextual knowledge of a place, that is all the more relevant when it comes to planning for reversibility, frugality and care. Urban planning and architecture research units in Grenoble are keen on such qualitative methods, refined over several decades, and will happily share this expertise with workshop participants.
The workshop's mission is to enable PhD students to share their research ideas, findings, and concerns in an informal atmosphere with mentors, high-level academic tutors, and other young scholars. It will feature a combination of small group study modules with plenary sessions and thematic workshops about methodology issues and PhD work-life balance. The program will also include one-on-one discussions with research mentors as well as social events. The workshop will be designed for both PhD students at an early and more advanced stage of doctoral research.
We expect abstracts of 600 words explaining the PhD researches and their relation to the large issues of the call, a cv and a list of publications.
Click here to download the template
Please send your abstracts in docx. format at
Please note that more information regarding the workshop will be continually updated on this webpage.
For any other information or queries please contact us at
