THEMATIC GROUPS

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Planning and Complexity

Published: 30 June 2025

INIVITATION

23rd Planning & Complexity Thematic Meeting | 20th year of the AESOP Thematic Group Planning and Complexity
Registration Deadline: 3 October 2025

THE DYNAMICS OF PANARCHY –
Sensing, Planning and Designing grounded local-regional transformations

27-28 November 2025
Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

Keynote speakers

• Jon Norberg: Professor at Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences, Stockholm University
• Sara Brorström: Professor Department of Business Administration, Gothenburg University

Planning and design often remain a hierarchical and linear process of planning, implementation and maintenance that meet with increasing political ambitions for inclusion, diversity and the critique of a technocratic agenda to spatial transformations. Initiatives in both practice and research constantly seek to combine both top-down and bottom-up approaches. For example, the recent missions of the European Union to strengthen innovation and development through a combination of overall political leadership and local implementation.

The connection between complexity science and spatial planning has, for at least the last 20 years, put the “the perspective of a world in flow, which feeds dissipative systems, through which these adapt and self-organize more or less continuously” (de Roo, 2018, p.28). However, few researchers and practitioners truly engage with the panarchic dynamic of complex adaptive systems and the theoretical and methodological implications – Non-hierarchical and mutual interaction, self-organization between actors, as well as structures and scales of transformation that follow (Gunderson & Holling, 2002). Furthermore, the transfer of a panarchic and adaptive model, developed for describing ecosystems, to describing social system poses critical questions. Beside adaptation, how do we deal with sustaining a diversity of subsystems? and how do we counteract negative effects such as socio-spatial inequalities and an uneven geographic development?

We invite scholars and scholarly practitioners to contribute with research and initiatives that engage with the dynamics of local-regional spatial transformation and the relations between actors, sectors, levels and scales through the lens of complexity theory, and especially working with panarchy, self-organisation, and the non-hierarchical interaction and dynamics of multi-level planning. How can transformations be more effectively conceptualised theoretically, while being grounded in local-regional realities?

Three avenues are of interest

Designing is in itself an iterative practice between phases of speculation, assessment, and proposing. We are interested in initiatives and studies that engage with design thinking and design practices to move beyond predefined, and often stereotyped visions of sustainable and attractive urban and rural development.

Planning tends to often be seen as a hierarchic and linear process of top-down decisions, regulations and governance. However, it is also a broad repertoire of practices that can create gaps and spaces. We are interested in research that critically engage in how planning can address uneven power relations and seeks radical inclusion and re-configurations that foster diversity and pluralism.

Sensing faces challenges to embark in analyses and interpretation beyond predefined categories and spatial units, e.g. reproducing power relations and spatial configurations. We are interested in approaches that can re-frame our sensing of interdependencies between scales, and that critically analyse the local-regional dynamics of circular systems.

Timeline

• Call for Papers: deadline already passed.
• Extended Abstracts Submission & Registration Deadline: 3 October 2025
• Conference in Gothenburg 27-28 November 2025.

Registration details

• Register at: https://chalmers.ungapped.io/Surveys/d1103781-6983-4552-9111-1923319e3a02 
• Registration Deadline: 3 October 2025

Organisation and Contact

The event is organised by Nils Björling and the research area Local-Regional Transformations at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden (local organising team 2025) together with Christian Lamker and Jenni Partanen (thematic group coordinators).

E-mail contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Visit the local organisers at:
https://www.chalmers.se/en/departments/ace/research/local-regional-transformations/

References

• de Roo, G. (2018). Ordering Principles in a Dynamic World of Change – On social complexity, transformation and the conditions for balancing purposeful interventions and spontaneous change. Progress in Planning, 125, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2017.04.002
• Gunderson, L. H., & Holling, C. S. (eds.) (2002). Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press.

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Published: 23 June 2025

Event of the AESOP Thematic Group ‘Public SpaceS and Urban Cultures’

10-11 September 2025, Eindhoven, NL

Hosted by Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)

 Prefiguring Hopeful Futures is a two-day, workshop-based symposium that brings together researchers, designers, artists, and practitioners to explore how small-scale, experimental, and everyday prefigurative practices shape just, sustainable, and multispecies futures. Structured around three intersecting strands— futures in the everyday, ecological transitions, and more-than-human design—the event invites critical, creative, and speculative engagements with urban action as a site of transformation.

We invite interested participants to submit an expression of interest by no later than 15 July 2025, by email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Overview

Prefiguring Hopeful Futures is a two-day workshop-based symposium that brings together scholars, designers, artists, and community practitioners engaged in hopeful, situated, and more-than-human urban practices. Hosted by Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and building on the legacy of the JPI-ENUTC project ‘CoNECT’ (www.jpiconect.eu), the event will explore how (small-scale, experimental, or everyday) prefigurative actions in urban environments contribute to the shaping of just, sustainable, and multispecies futures. Rather than treating topics like climate transition, community care, or ecological design as separate silos, this event reads them as overlapping zones of transformation. With an emphasis on practice as theory and engagement as speculation, the symposium offers space for grounded exchange, mutual learning, and co-creation. Through dialogues, site visits, and workshops, we will trace fragments of alternative futures already contained in the urban present.

The symposium is organized around three intersecting strands, understood as shared lenses and as part of a larger conversation about reimagining urban life:

1. Futures in the everyday: How do seemingly ordinary practices and spaces (maintenance, rituals, routines) carry the seeds of larger transformation? This strand looks at how hope is cultivated through grounded, lived experience.
2. Ecological transitions as collective practices: Moving beyond abstract sustainability goals, this strand focuses on urban responses to climate and ecological crises that are participatory, embedded in local cultures, and attentive to interdependence across species and systems.
3. Designing more-than-human urban futures: Exploring how design practices, from speculative tools to spatial experiments, can shape inclusive, post-human urban imaginaries. Emphasis is placed on multispecies cohabitation, rewilding, and situated care ecologies.

Theme

Amid social, ecological, and political crises, it is urgent to imagine and enact urban futures grounded in justice, care, and interdependence. While dominant systems often appear insurmountable, alternative spaces of reimagination persist: in community gardens, local commons, neighbourhood assemblies, experimental housing, and everyday acts of maintenance. These practices are often provisional and situated, offering glimpses of different worlds through small but meaningful gestures. As per Ernst Bloch’s understanding of “concrete utopias” (1988 [1957]), hope is not a passive condition, but an active engagement with possibility, forged in specific socio-material contexts.

This symposium is animated by the lens of prefiguration, a way of understanding political and spatial practices as experiments in living otherwise (Franks, 2018; Maeckelbergh, 2016). Through this lens, even small actions can be read as expressions of hope: hopeful not because they promise closure or totalizing solutions, but because they embody situated, relational responses to the challenges of the present and alternatives to business-as-usual. Prefigurative hope is not an abstract ideal but something practiced, an ongoing process grounded in everyday life, local ecologies, and collective imagination.

Furthermore, urban futures are increasingly understood as deeply entangled with non-human agency, ecological interdependencies, and the material politics of urban nature (Latour, 2005; Haraway, 2003; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). From green infrastructure and multispecies habitats to post-human design approaches and neighbourhood rewilding, prefigurative practices today often reflect a growing recognition of nature not as aesthetic background, but as part of the urban community. As alternatives to the ways of thinking and acting that produced our current crises, we understand ecological transition, collective care, and post-human imaginaries as overlapping in practice and thought, forming intersecting strands of a broader urban transformation: woven together in urban commons and everyday actions that test and shape more liveable, multispecies futures.

This symposium seeks to gather a wide range of perspectives – empirical, theoretical, and artistic – that explore what kinds of hopeful worlds are imagined, tested, or enacted through situated urban and ecological practices; how these practices express enduring hope for the future in the present; in what ways ecological transition, collective care, and more-than-human relations are braided together in urban life; and how such actions might inspire others through example, reproduction, or resonance.

We are especially interested in grounded practices and experimental formats that help us trace the overlapping strands of hopeful urban futures, including but not limited to:

• Cultures of care and mutual aid
• Climate-resilient and biodiverse urban practices
• Sufficiency and the good life beyond consumerism
• Situated, more-than-human design approaches
• Plural forms of dwelling and co-governance
• Participatory futuring and inclusive collective practices

We invite contributions from across planning, geography, urban sociology, architecture, and design. In keeping with the theme of prefiguring alternatives, we are open to formats and approaches that reimagine the role of research and academia. Our aim is to co-create a space that foregrounds urban transformation as both imaginative and practical, where nature, community, and design are understood as interdependent elements of a hopeful, post-anthropocentric urban future.

References

Bloch, E. (1988 [1957]). The Principle of Hope, Volume 1. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Franks, B. (2018). Prefiguration. In C. Levy (ed.), Anarchism (pp. 28–43). Routledge.

Graeber, D. (2013). It is value that brings universes into being. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(2), 219–243.

Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Maeckelbergh, M. (2016). The prefigurative turn: The time and place of social movement practice. In Dinerstein, A.C. (ed.), Social Sciences for An Other Politics: Women Theorizing Without Parachutes (pp. 121–134). Palgrave.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Format and practical information

10–11 September 2025, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

This is a participatory and hands-on symposium, designed to foster exchange and shared exploration rather than formal paper delivery. We envisage a mix of workshops, short presentations, site-based activities, and group dialogue, and welcome a wide range of formats and disciplinary perspectives. This may include:

• (Short) academic papers
• Creative or artistic works
• Posters or visual storytelling
• Design tools or speculative methods
• Community or site-based practices
• Participatory workshops or experiments

Contributions should align with the event’s themes and values, particularly its emphasis on contextual, inclusive, and more-than-human perspectives. In keeping with the theme of prefiguring alternatives, we are open to formats and approaches that reimagine the role of research and academia.

There is no registration fee, but participants are responsible for their own travel and accommodation. Lunch will be provided, as will a shared symposium dinner on Wednesday 10 September. Recommended accommodation options and travel information will be shared with accepted participants.

Submission process

We invite interested participants to submit an expression of interest by no later than 15 July 2025, by email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . This should include:

• A short abstract or proposal (up to 300 words) describing the focus and content of your contribution;
• The preferred format of your contribution: presentation, workshop, creative work, or site-based activity;
• A short bio (max 100 words), including your background and affiliation.

A pre-event webinar and feedback session will be offered in early August to connect contributors and support preparation.

Organizers

Dr. Oana Druta (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Louwrens Botha (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Giulia Gualtieri (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Representatives of AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures: Mohamed Saleh (University of Groningen, the Netherlands), Tihomir Viderman (BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany)

More information on AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures series on Hope can be found here: https://aesop-planning.eu/tg-news/public-spaces-and-urban-cultures/call-for-expressions-of-interest-to-host-the-thematic-groups-meeting-2024-2026-public-spaces-urban-cultures-and-hope

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: New Technologies & Planning

Published: 13 June 2025

AAA We will have a

New Technologies and Planning Thematic Group Meeting at the AESOP Congress 2025 in Istanbul

The meeting will be held on Wednesday 9 July at 12:45 - 14:00.

Room A0-07 in building A (Economics Faculty)

Save the date and time!

You are cordially invited to join!

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Planning/Conflict

Published: 26 May 2025

Contested Istanbul: Urban development and planning conflicts in Turkey’s ‘aspiring global city’

(special session organized in association with the AESOP TG Planning/Conflict)

AESOP Annual Congress 2025 Istanbul, July 7th – July 11th 2025

Organizers: Enrico Gualini and Esin Özdemir

Contributions by Deniz Ay, Yildiz Erdoğan, Melis Oğuz Çevik, Adile Avar and Burcu Değerli Çiftçi

Turkish metropoles have experienced in the last decades the impact of state-led boosterist urban policies. Istanbul is at the forefront of this process, as the largest and most dynamic metropolis of the country in both economic and social and terms.

Istanbul has taken central place as an ‘aspiring global city’ (Ay and Özkul 2016) in national state urban policies. This has developed into a peculiar Istanbul way to authoritarian neoliberalism, based on massive investment in support of speculative private entrepreneurialism, and on corporate-style marketing and management framed within state-led governance arrangements.

At the heart of these urban policies are multiscalar interventions – some already implemented, some still on the national government agenda – ranging from infrastructural mega-projects to urban renewal projects at neighbourhood level. These interventions, particularly for large-scale infrastructure investments projects, are often implemented in public-private partnership arrangements lacking accountability and citizen involvement.

Framed by the national government’s globalist ambitions as well as emergency arguments – like earthquake disaster prevention – and by legally supported by ad-hoc legal frameworks, these measures have strongly impacted on the historical urban fabric and on the livelihood and identity of local communities. As a consequence, a broad range of issues of contention and conflict have emerged, concerning among others:

• the centralized-authoritarian decision-making logic, restraining civil society and local communities as well as local governments from democratic involvement;
• the negative impact on local communities such as displacement and dispossession;
• the depletion of natural resources for sustainable urban development, such as water basins and forests;
• the commodification and erosion of public spaces;
• the destruction of the historical urban fabric and identity;
• social inclusion, poverty and the integration of human and more-than-human diversity in the city.

Against this background, Istanbul has experienced a long season of state-authoritarian repression of urban insurgencies – with the case of Gezi Park as a hallmark. Over time, Istanbul has also marked a nation-wide unique if troubled attempt to introduce an original neo-municipalist path to urban reform, possibly introducing opportunities for a different approach to the contradictions and conflicts generated by its recent urban development path.

In this session – organized in association with the AESOP TG Planning/Conflict – we ask engaged scholars and activists to reflect on the contentious nature of urban politics and planning in Istanbul. The aim is not only to give a critical overview of current issues and their long-term causes, but also to reflect on the aftermath and heritage of democratic protest, civic insurgency and planner-activist engagement in a forward-looking perspective of generating possible alternatives.