12th AESOP YA Conference – Groningen, The Netherlands – 26-29th March 2018
The Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen is proud to host the 12th AESOP YA Conference in March 2018. This conference aims to look for insights into how various disciplines within planning, and related to planning, are dealing with change. We invite researchers and practitioners dealing with environmental, technological, population and political change. Attention is paid to how these processes are conceptualised and which planning responses are promoted. Additionally, the conference aims to ask how is it possible to diversify planning approaches that deal with various forms of (positive or negative) change, and questions how they impact society and affect people’s every-day lives. We wish to examine both the analytical and normative dimensions across various disciplines within and closely related to planning. We therefore aim to contribute to interdisciplinary exchange within planning related research and practice on navigating change.
The conference is a four day event consisting of three keynote talks (Patrick Devine-Wright, Maarten Hajer and Philip McCann), parallel sessions for young academics to present their research, two parallel workshops and a fieldtrip. In the parallel sessions participants will benefit from the insight of a track chair that is renowned in his/her field, and the feedback of a discussant. The proposed tracks are: environmental change, technological change, population change, political change, and planning approaches for change. Each of these tracks also relates to central themes, such as social, cultural and spatial transformation. Therefore, abstracts related to these central themes are welcome to submit to any of the tracks. We will consider modifying the tracks in order to do justice to the approved abstracts, and we aim to end up with four official conference tracks.
For more information about abstract/paper guidelines, submission and many more, please proceed to the Call for Abstracts subpage. The conference is free of charge to Members of the AESOP YA Network (registration for the network is free on the website). We initially envisaged offering travel grant awards to participants who were travelling from afar and needed further support in order to participate in the conference. This is something that has not been done previously and was dependent on receiving sufficient conference sponsorship, which was uncertain for a long time. We received sufficient sponsorship to award 1 travel grant award specifically for video abstracts. We then judged the video abstracts based on quality and their timely submission by the deadline date. Those who has been awarded a travel grant award has been notified. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact the conference organisers at
