AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures
Call for Expressions of Interest to host the Thematic Group’s Meeting 2024-2026
"Public Spaces, Urban Cultures, and Hope"
Working theme written by the TG PSUC’s Coordination team [Tihomir Viderman (BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg), Matej Nikšič (Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia), Evangelia Athanassiou (Aristotle University Thessaloniki)]. Reviews and revisions by TG PSUC’s Core Working Group [Sabine Knierbein (TU Wien, Vienna), Patricia Lopes Simoes Aelbrecht (Cardiff University), Christine Mady (Aalto University, Helsinki)].
Why hope as a theme?
As today’s societies confront multiple challenges, weaving hope into public space and urban cultures debates offers a chance to envision and set pathways for regeneration, rebuilding, reassessment, and reconstruction towards more inclusive shared futures. A prevailing agreement in urban studies is that political, social, and cultural forces, in particular in light of growing environmental and geopolitical risks, often fragment the urban fabric, accelerate commodification, and reinforce asymmetries in power structures, often disproportionately affecting the most disadvantaged social groups. This dynamics exacerbates social inequalities and deepens divides, both within and across borders. Against this backdrop, hope offers an opportunity to extend critical insights into the urban condition—from analysing life as being under constant strain to engaging with the contingent nature of urban space that reveals moments of anticipation and intent. In this sense, hope is where material practices, lived experiences, cultural expressions, and imagined and symbolic spaces converge. It is not merely about individual desires for change, but about collective endeavours to influence the material, imagined, and sensed dynamics that shape urban realities. As an analytical prism, hope also allows us to envision better urban futures, from the micro-scale of often invisible struggles within homes to the global scale of planetary urbanization, from the inventiveness and immediacy of everyday life towards long-term plans and strategies.
Hope and the materiality of (imagined) public spaces
The materiality of public spaces occupies a prominent position in channelling society’s hopes. Paradoxically, its value for creating fair and just cities is often overlooked by power structures and broader publics alike. Public space, as many thinkers have highlighted, has never been a given and can never be taken for granted. Hence, it can be seen both as the contingent outcome of past and present social struggles and as an indicator of society's aspirations for the future. Public spaces reflect how society has hoped for future, envisioned change, and negotiated transformative actions, resulting in outcomes that range from prosperous to bleak realities. Nonetheless, public spaces remain manifestations of hopeful actions by diverse groups claiming and redefining the city—whether through material expressions like urban art and barrier-free accessibility or conceptual notions like inclusion and difference.
Hope as a driver of urban cultures
Hope is also central to urban cultures, conceptually and practically opening gaps that challenge established power structures and social norms. Urban cultures often engage with disruptions in the settled foundations and routines of society, creating conditions for change. They are imbued with hope. They thrive on people’s capacity to contest social constraints through improvisation, creativity, and action. By infusing everyday struggles with transformative hope, urban cultures serve as underlying drivers of positive change. This hope is evident in creating moments where people, be they collectivized groups, social non-movements or non-collectivised bodies, can engage with the unfamiliar and interact equitably and non-violently across differences.
The dual nature of hope: Between emancipation and control
Public spaces have frequently been at the centre of struggles over social reordering and grounding, imbued with hopeful visions of emancipation, and even more so of movements striving for liberation. While hope is often perceived as a positive force, the ongoing state of unsettledness worldwide reminds us that hope in the context of public spaces and urban cultures has a dual nature. While it can be a powerful and inspiring force for positive change, hope also risks being reduced to a mere rhetorical tool, used to gain public support for policies and projects without a genuine commitment to addressing structural issues or delivering meaningful change. As seen at radical-right rallies, hope is sometimes also co-opted to legitimize unjust power structures rather than challenge them. The danger lies in the potential instrumentalisation of hope, particularly in constructing hegemonic political, social, cultural, and symbolic spaces that are based on exclusion, dispossession, or, simply, hatred, and perpetuate power disparities. The co-optation of hope against the legacy of past emancipatory and liberatory struggles can conceal or dismiss social realities that do not fit into a one-dimensional understanding of public space and urban culture, draw impermeable boundaries, and construct divided societies.
Within this thematic framework, we want to highlight the emancipatory and liberatory potentials of hope. We emphasize the importance of practices rooted in solidarity, agonistic negotiation, and the pursuit of justice and care in recognition of the plurality of diverse everyday experiences. Hope as a concept stands for an inspiring vision of positive change. Hope as an action embodies the ability to see beyond crisis situations and dead ends, enabling the imagination of different future and enactment of different present. Rather than merely projecting far-off futures, hope is rooted in reshaping today’s realities through new possibilities and immediate change. To hope is to persevere, to actively engage in overcoming challenges, despite their growing magnitude, in the pursuit of collective freedom and transformation.
How do we (want to) hope?
Within this thematic framework, we ask:
How do public spaces and urban cultures inspire, nurture, enact, shape, curb, or even extinguish hope?
How do public spaces and urban cultures enable individuals and groups to actively hope—to reimagine and transform their realities through immediate, tangible actions?
How can hope be used to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, and capacities of public spaces and urban cultures in creating fair and just places?
By exploring this question, we aim to understand how we hope, how we want to hope, as well as what we hope for. The potential of hope in urban studies lies in recognizing its multifaceted nature. By embracing the complex interplay between hope as a unifying, positive force and the risks of its instrumentalisation, we aim to better understand the transformative possibilities of public spaces and urban cultures. Hope is not a static condition but is lived in everyday life—constantly redefined through the use of public spaces and urban cultures, as collective actions of individuals and groups strive to shape better urban futures.
Furthermore, we seek to explore how hope manifests in different urban contexts, from grassroots movements to institutional policies. By examining case studies and real-world examples, we can identify the conditions under which hope thrives and the barriers it faces. This approach allows us to not only theorize about hope but also provide actionable insights for urban planners, creative designers, activists, artists, policymakers, and communities. Our goal is to foster a deeper understanding of how hope can contribute to creating more equitable, inclusive, and vibrant urban environments.
Addressing the call for proposals
The AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures invites proposals that explore the material, social, cultural, political, ecological, economic, symbolic, imagined, and discursive manifestations of hope in public spaces and urban cultures across different scales and disciplines. This call is open to a broad range of debates, approaches, and perspectives on urban issues, from both contemporary and historical viewpoints. The goal is to examine how diverse fields of knowledge and positionalities manifest and become embedded in public spaces and urban cultures by evoking hope (hope as an idea), by evolving through hopeful thinking (hope as a concept) or by enacting hopeful action (hope as a framework for action) or by caring forms of embodied hope (hope as a bodily sensation). We seek to understand how varied experiences, dominant paradigms, and broader worldviews leave a lasting impact on urban life, showcasing the transformative, situated, and embodied potential of hope within public spaces and urban cultures.
The proposals can address a broad range of topics through the analytical and speculative prism of hope, or with the focus on situations, places, methods, procedures and narratives of hope:
- Collective learning process on public spaces
- Mutual learning and acceptance,
- Urban pedagogies,
- Public spaces as the arena of building relations in the city,
- Public space and the transgressive features of arts,
- Public space as a public right,
- Public space actors and participation,
- Negotiation, exchange and encounters in public space,
- Care, embodied experience and affective and tactful relations in public space,
- Public space, de-escalation and non-violent action in public space,
- Visionary thinking and utopian action in present public space,
- Public spaces in countries of conflict, and conflict in public spaces.
- Vi-real public space for children, youth and the elderly (virtual-real)
- Urban cultures reshaping urban space
- Inventiveness of everyday cultures,
- Visual cultural and digital urban cultures,
- Urban cultures between the real and the possible,
- Alter and anti-politics and urban cultural politics,
- Social inequality and difference,
- Democracy, dissidence, and spatial justice,
- Inclusion and (Community) resilience,
- Politics of possibilities and positionality,
- Publicness beyond open spaces, in relation to internal public spaces (or types of social infrastructure).
- Convivial cultural expression and the politics of touch (and being touched).
- Music, poetry, and performance as cultural forms of resistance.
- Cultural aesthetics, democracy and dissidence.
- Public space adaptation and mitigation
- New and ‘worlded’ humanisms,
- Digital literacy and the common good,
- Animal-aided and non-human centered design,
- Health and well-being in public space,
- Digitalisation and technological advancements,
- Economic and material aspects of public space,
- Environmental and climate justice,
- Housing, neighbourhoods and dwelling in public space,
- Infrastructures of hope,
- Urban transformation and presentist democracy,
- Urban coproduction and new state-civil society alliances,
- Dynamics of unsettlement, dispossession, gentrification and touristification.
Proposal submission
Proposals are invited for meetings/workshops/conferences or other formats, bringing together participants from academia (universities and research institutes), civil society, urban policy and practice as well as urban arts and activism, among others. Proposals should indicate what kind of contributions and formats of exchange will engage with the call’s theme, to arrive at tangible, synergetic outputs on the potentialities and different roles that the analytical and speculative prism of hope could cast on public spaces and urban cultures.
For questions regarding the organization of the meetings please send an email to:
Schedule
Call launched in October 2024
Submission of expression of interest: by 9 December 2024 to
Joint Online Meeting for development of full proposal: 16 December 2024
Submission of full proposals: by 20 January 2025
Expression of Interest. This is a brief outline, up to one page in length, including the working title, host, organizers, a brief description of the theme/ issues to be tackled (300 words), anticipated format, and potential synergies with ongoing research projects or other events.
Full Proposal. This will be prepared following the joint online meeting in coordination with the thematic group. It should include the title, host, organizers, scientific committee, venue, duration, format, anticipated number of participants, an extended description of the topic, a draft of agenda, participant recruitment (including a draft of an open call, if applicable), and funding.
Procedure. Interested parties who have submitted an expression of interest to host a TG event will be invited to a joint online meeting with the TG coordination team. After this meeting, the host institution will prepare the full proposal. The host institution then prepares the event in close collaboration with two TG representatives, who will assist the local organizers in developing the event's theme and agenda. The hosting institution will also invite the two TG representatives to join the event’s scientific committee. Once the open call or other event format details are finalized, they will be shared on the TG homepage and disseminated through local and TG networks, as well as on social media.
The format of the event is open. The events are mostly held in the format of two- days workshops/seminars/conferences that often include a field trip. During these events, participants are encouraged to give presentations about their research and design projects on the relevant topic. TG’s policy is that all its events are free of cost to its members, and that at least keynote lectures are open to the public without any costs (in place, and/or virtually through livestream). Participants usually cover their own travel and accommodation expenses.
Mission, aims and engagement within the Thematic Group on Public Spaces and Urban Cultures
The AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures critically and constructively explores the nature of urban cultures and public spaces, offering opportunities by connecting and building networks with the AESOP Planning Community, other scientific communities engaged with these topics, European research networks, policymakers, local communities, and urban activists, among others. The group brings together individuals from a wide range of disciplines, including Art, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Planning, Urban Design, Policy, Urban Sociology, Urban Geography, Urban Ethnography, and more. The group brings together members dedicated to:
- theory, concepts, open speculation
- methodology, methods combination, method reflection
- empirical field research and related ethics
- education and learning
- policy, regulation and planning
- civic design, co-production and collective meaning-making
The members of the AESOP Thematic Group on Public Spaces and Urban Cultures discuss and develop approaches proposed under the biennial group’s working theme and engage in peer-to-peer exchange on research and design projects. In addition to the annual AESOP Conference, the group has regular meetings spanning academia, praxis and activism, which take place in the form of workshops, seminars and conferences, accompanied by field trips.
We acknowledge the institutions and colleagues that have hosted our events so far:
Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space, TU Wien (Vienna);
Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia (Ljubljana);
Institute for Research on Innovation and Services for Development of Naples, National Research Council of Italy (IRISS-CNR, Naples);
Human Cities Symposium Organizers, Faculté d’Architecture La Cambre Horta and ProMateria (Brussels);
Middle East Technical University (Ankara);
Technical University of Lisbon (Lisbon);
Ozyegin University (Istanbul);
UN Habitat World Urban Forum (Medellin);
Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urban Planning (Bucharest);
La Villette School of Architecture (Paris);
Public Space Biennale at Faculty of Architecture Roma Tre (Rome);
University of Glasgow (Glasgow);
Czech Technical University Faculty of Architecture (Prague);
CITTA Research Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment, University of Porto (Porto);
Faculty of Architecture, Arts, and Design, Notre Dame University Louaize (Zouk Mosbeh);
Tracce Urbane and Laboratory of Urban Studies at Sapienza (Rome);
Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus (Nicosia);
Wageningen University (Wageningen);
Gothenburg University (Gothenburg);
Cardiff University (Cardiff);
IUAV (Venice);
Delft University of Technology (Delft);
Gdańsk University of Technology (Gdańsk);
Aristotle University (Thessaloniki);
Eastern Mediterranean University (Famagusta);
Aalto University (Helsinki);
UCLA Luskin – School of Public Affairs (Los Angeles);
University of Pretoria (Pretoria)
