Event of the AESOP Thematic Group ‘Public Spaces and Urban Cultures’
15/16 September 2025
Newcastle University/Newcastle Contemporary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Partner organisations:
Newcastle University, School of Architecture, Building and Planning, Newcastle upon Tyne
(United Kingdom), Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne (United Kingdom), Vrije
University Brussels, The Brussels Centre for Urban Studies (Belgium), and University of
Pretoria, Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology (South Africa)
Lead organisers: Dr Georgiana Varna (Newcastle University, United Kingdom), Dr Michael
Crilly (Northumbria University, United Kingdom), and Dr Karina Landman (University of
Pretoria, South Africa)
Team members:
Bas van Heur, Professor of Urban Studies, Head of the research unit Cosmopolis Centre for
Urban Research, director of the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies; Mark Oranje, Professor
of Town and Regional Planning, University of Pretoria, Department of Engineering, Built
Environment and Information Technology, Pretoria, South Africa; Sabine Knierbein,
Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space and Associate Professor for
Urban Culture and Public Space, TU Wien, Austria; and Tihomir Viderman, Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany, Lead of AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning) Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures.
Contact: Dr Georgiana Varna
Theme:
This seminar series is intended to offer a meeting space for urban researchers, activists, and practitioners involved in experimental, collaborative, future-oriented projects focused on improving the urban public realm and urban public life. The primary focus is unravelling and understanding current urban practices that have emerged in recent years as alternatives to mainstream planning and urban governance processes, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. These can be together described as ‘experimental urbanism’, presented in the public and academic discourse through often overlapping and related terms such as temporary urbanism, ad-hoc urbanism, DiY urbanism, pop-up urbanism, Lowfi urbanism, tactical urbanism, or guerrilla urbanism. We seek to bring together in dialogue researchers, activists and practitioners involved in undertaking meaningful public realm and third-place projects that break with common planning and urban design practices, either in terms of experimental methods of place-making, innovative governance approaches to urban processes or radical creative spatial interventions. Regarding its underlying logics, experimentation uses a mode of knowledge generation based on reflexivity, which includes continuous reflection, assessment and readjustment; therefore, a feedback loop is generated, where an experiment is proposed and delivered, with data being collected and analysed, fed into urban policy and then leading to further experimental activities (Evans and Karvonen, 2014; Karvonen et. al., 2016).
We therefore advocate experimentation as the right approach to deal with wicked and complex societal and environmental problems, which defy established forms of problemsolving. The key purpose of this seminar series is to bring together collaborative urban experiments in an open and dynamic dialogue regarding stakeholder agency and impact on stronger community belonging and democratic engagement outcomes, with the aim of building more socially sustainable urban futures. Collectively urban experiments allow us to (a) avoid retrospective policy interventions and responses where projects are only supported where there is already substantive evidence for successful urban interventions; (b) have the explicit ability to learn from mistakes and sub-optimal interventions without critical risk; (c) building a resource base for more diverse responses to planning and managing urban futures.
The substantive outcomes from the geographically diverse case studies from different scales, contexts and partnership organisations in the Global South and the developed North will bring a more diverse range of planning solutions for possible futures. More significantly, they will demonstrate and differentiate how ‘process innovation’ and an evidence-base derived from experimentation can result in a variety of physical and policy interventions beneficial for the needed expansion of urban and planning studies.
For our first event at Newcastle University – Newcastle Contemporary Art, on the 15th and 16th of September 2025, we would like to invite academic paper contributions and/or practitioner problem-setting pieces and practical examples or case studies on the following themes:
- Experiments in urban design and architecture that challenge conventional norms and promote spatial innovation in a broader social justice context.
- Experimental urban projects addressing key contemporary urban challenges in sustainability and green infrastructures research.
- Experiments in urban governance from a wide range of perspectives, and from both bottom-up and top-down viewpoints;
- Policy innovations, and the changing legal / financial context for undertaking experiments;
- Theoretical contributions and thought experiments on the value and potential of experimental urbanism to add to current urban planning, architecture and urban design academic and practice debates;
- Experimental urban technologies and new infrastructures, such as urban robotics, Internet of Things (IoT), digital twins, gamification and related fields.
We have envisioned several aims and outputs resulting from this symposium:
- An edited volume entitled Experimental Urbanism and Future Cities with Routledge or Palgrave/McMillan.
- A Special Issue on experimental urbanism and its role in helping achieve more inclusive, sustainable and resilient urban futures for Journal of Urban Studies or Cities;
- The creation of an international academic/practitioner blended network UrbEx and associate web-based digital platform to host it
- A guide for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) on how to maximise the impact of their research.
Participants will be invited to collaborate in the above after the four symposia take place, in June 2026.
You are invited to submit your proposal for a paper / presentation. Please include author(s), organisation / institution, with a proposed title and a 300-word abstract. Email your proposal to
The event will consist of a dynamic exchange of novel ideas to solve complex ‘wicked problems’ and include a combination of talks from academics and practitioners involved in experimental urban projects and research, workshops, site visit and social events. The event is free of charge and catering will be provided; however, participants need to cover the costs of travel and accommodation.
Warm welcome to Newcastle!
