THEMATIC GROUPS

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Published: 07 December 2016

Dear Members of the TG PSUC, dear all,

We would be happy if you would consider submitting an abstract to the Track 4. Urban design, public spaces and urban culture (details below) at the upcoming AESOP conference in Lisbon.

More information on how to submit an abstract (deadline, 9 of January 2017):
http://aesop2017.pt/index.php/presenters/abstracts-full-paper-submissions

Track 4. Urban design, public spaces and urban culture
Co-chairs: Ali Madanipour; Gabriella Esposito De Vita; Pedro George
http://aesop2017.pt/index.php/programme/themes-tracks

Hope meeting you in Lisbon
Best wishes
Gabriella, Sabine and Ceren
with Nikolai, Kat and Sara

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Published: 06 December 2016

AESOP Thematic Group for Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Series UNSTABLE GEOGRAPHIES – DISLOCATED PUBLICS

First meeting, Beirut, 9-11 November 2016

Defragmenting and Activating Public Spaces in Unstable Urban Settings

Organized and hosted by:

Faculty of Architecture, Art and Design at the Notre Dame University – Louaize

The organization process started after 5 April 2016 upon the notification by the AESOP TG PSUC about the meeting being held in Beirut in November 2016. The process entailed skype meetings and correspondence to set the call for abstracts, followed by a double-blind peer review to select the submissions that would be presented as papers during the meeting. This was followed by a close follow up with participants on the one hand, and coordination with actors for the case studies of the site visit on the other hand.

Three case studies in Beirut were chosen for their manifestation of different public space initiatives that dealt with the problematic presented in the thematic group’s meeting. While one site visit had to be cancelled for logistical reasons, the other two were conducted successfully during the second meeting day.

In preparation of the meeting, a brief on the site visit and compilation of the drafts of the presented papers were made available to participants.

SUMMARY. A three days meeting of the AESOP Thematic Group for Public Spaces and Urban Cultures (AESOP TG PSUC) was organized and hosted by the Faculty of Architecture, Art and Design at the Notre Dame University – Louaize in Beirut, Lebanon. This meeting launched the new thematic series: Unstable Geographies – Dislocated Publics which aims at addressing current issues related to public spaces common to cities globally, from an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective, while engaging a variety of actors and stakeholders through four themes:

• City, refugees, and migration
• Fragmented social fabric – individualised patterns of consumption
• The decline of national politics – Resurgence of the urban political
• Change of perspective – worlding urban studies

The purpose of the Beirut meeting, organized in parallel to the City Street2 Conference was to unfold themes under the title of the series within the local and unstable context of Beirut. Based on the characteristics and issues in Beirut that are also pertinent to other cities in the global South as well as the global North, this TG meeting focused on the two sub-themes: City, Refugees and Migration, and Fragmented Social Fabric: Individualised Patterns of Consumption.

THE THEME_ DEFRAGMENTING AND ACTIVATING PUBLIC SPACES IN UNSTABLE URBAN SETTINGS. Similar to other countries hosting immigrants and refugees, Lebanon is undergoing various dynamics related to refugees, migration and social fragmentation, which lead to changes in urban spaces and everyday social life, thus turning it to fertile ground for collaborative ideas among public space scholars and practitioners from different backgrounds. Beirut has a prolonged history of conflict that affected its public spaces, and therefore serves as a laboratory to explore, unravel, and question the lives of its public spaces, and their evolution through time. Despite the various obstacles, pockets of public spaces that are either managed by the local authorities or invented by urbanites emerge within the city. These signal the co-presence of contrasts on many levels including the social, economic, spatial, functional, and political. Within these contrasts, various ‘publics’ navigate through the city’s urban spaces, and generate social interactions, activities, and relations over time, despite the broader conflicts that the city keeps witnessing.

The purpose of the investigation during this meeting was to determine the roles of various stakeholders in providing further opportunities for the sustained accommodation of differences, encounter, and exposure to ‘the other’, in an attempt to defragment public spaces within turbulent and unpredictable contexts.

THE MEETING. The meeting combined various formats of exchange including the keynote speeches of CS2, presentations from the contributions to a call for papers on the first day, a field visit on the second say and a workshop on the third day.  A concluding roundtable discussion on the third day consolidated the ideas, concerns and recommendations presented during the meeting, and set the basis for further practical and theoretical explorations. The meeting brought together around 40 participants researchers and students from various disciplines, practitioners, activists and NGOs whose interest focuses on public spaces.

DAY1_presentations. During the first day of the meeting, participants had the opportunity to present and reflect on 11 papers focusing on the two themes City, Refugees and Migration, and Fragmented Social Fabric: Individualised Patterns of Consumption. In addition, the three sites which the group planned to visit during the second day were presented and discussed.

DAY2_Site visits. During the second day of the meeting participants had the opportunity to visit two locations within administrative Beirut and its suburbs.

The first location was at a public space in the area of Naba’a which falls within the municipality of Bourj Hammoud, in the eastern part of the capital city. The project is initiated by UN-Habitat as part of their public space program and was realized through a participatory process, involving the local community. During the visit participants were accompanied by UN-Habitat representatives and had the opportunity to meet with people from the local community and discuss the initiative. The aim was to understand the community’s vision for the space, the participatory process and to reflect on people’s understanding of public space in a context of multiple, heterogeneous and often conflicting communities.

The second location was at Tariq El Jdideh, a residential and mixed use area located west of the `Beirut Pine forest, locally known as “Horsh Beirut”. Participants walked through local streets and paid attention to the landmarks including the municipal stadium in an attempt to understand the relation between the “Horsh” and its western edge, the potential of the municipal stadium to evolve as an inclusive public space and as a common ground accepting the surrounding communities and the refugees in the area.

DAY3_Workshop. During the third day, the workshop provided the opportunity for participants to reflect on the case studies visited during the second day, to discuss, exchange views and propose ideas with the purpose of sharing resources and producing knowledge on contemporary public space concerns.

Contacts. Formore information on the meeting, including abstracts of the lectures, description of the visited sites, the themes of the workshop, and the involved people please contact:

Christine Mady (Lebanon) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (local host)

Nadia Charalambous (Cyprus) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (AESOP TG representative)

Matej Niksic (Slovenia) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (AESOP TG representative)

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Published: 21 July 2016

An Open Letter to the AESOP academic community: Statement of solidarity with the academics in Turkey and Turkish scholars abroad

In the current unsettling climate of Turkey, the Turkish government prohibits the basic pillars of the scientific and academic works by limiting the freedom of speech, mobility and international exchange of the academics in Turkey, and of Turkish academics abroad.  We, as the AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures, are concerned about these silences and the selective condemnations. We stand in solidarity with our colleagues affected by this and fully claim for their rights to practice their profession in a full extent, in a global community of academic scholars.

To all our colleagues in the AESOP academic community:  Please be in touch and offer support for our colleagues in Turkey. For those, who plan to organise symposia, conferences, summer schools: please do invite our Turkish colleagues to make visible what is now closed off, to give a voice to those who are now silenced out.

AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Published: 05 July 2016

AESOP Thematic Group for Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Series: Becoming Local

Call for papers for a Special Issue in Journal of Urban Design

Becoming Local: inquiries into public space practices, meanings and values

The AESOP Thematic Group for Public Spaces and Urban Cultures aims to better understand the relational nature of public spaces by using different concepts of urban culture as analytical perspectives. We support studies on evolving urban cultures and renewed intellectual and practical challenges that these practices pose to the way public spaces are used, interpreted, designed, and taught. We share and exchange different disciplinary approaches and experiences in practice and theory on the related subjects through research activities and workshops at an international scale.

The Thematic Group has organized a series of meetings under the general umbrella theme “Becoming Local” for the period 2013-2015. Each organisation team (local organisers and AESOP TG representatives) developed their own sub-theme related to the umbrella theme, on the one hand, and embedded into the local context, on the other. Within this context, the meetings reflected different topics as `The power of places & the places of power” (Glasgow), issues of “Emancipation in planning and design” (Vienna), “Transforming spaces, redefining localities” (Paris) or “Generative places, smart approaches, happy people” (Porto). Contributions brought insights in contextual differences and highlighted the necessity of developing new epistemologies, research tactics, action-based methodologies and researcher identities bridging across academic and institutional boundaries. Multiple perspectives emerged along the series, exploring the set of practices and values that interact in urban spaces as crossroads where global and local forces meet and sometimes collide.

Our call for papers for a special issue in Journal of Urban Design has the goal to assemble and to precise insights of the becoming local series. We encourage contributors from the different workshops as well as other authors, who report from different fronts of becoming local in public space.

This call brings out the topics discussed, namely, by:

1)  Understanding public spaces as “places” where global tendencies ‘sediment’ and are being ‘translated’ and ‘transformed’ according to local cultural, social and political contexts.

2) Public spaces as a ‘reflection of local identities’ shaped by community behaviours, patterns of everyday life and collective memories.

 3)    Public spaces as a ‘ground of investigation of place making practices’ by different actors and agents particularly in the context of changing role of state, market and civil society in shaping, creating and transforming public spaces.

Given the above, the aim of this special issue is to explore relevant debates on public space, bringing together researchers and case studies from different urban contexts. The outcome aims to contribute to the debate of achieving a consensus to create inclusive public spaces.

Guidelines for abstracts

Interested contributors from both practice and academia, and at their interface, are invited to submit an abstract of maximum 350 words to the e-mail address This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The abstracts should include:

• Title, key words
• Author’s name, current affiliation and e-mail address
• Research question, methodology, and findings of the research
• Maximum five key references
• Short bibliography and list of recent publications of the author(s)
• Two photos at a good resolution (200dpi) illustrating the contents of the proposed contribution (if needed)

The deadline for abstract submission is 31th August. The results of a preliminary review will be announced by the end of September. The selected authors will, then, be invited to submit full papers by the 15th of December.

Sara Santos Cruz (Oporto, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.);

Nadia Charalambous (Nicosia, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.);

Nikolai Roskamm (Berlin, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Links to the series meetings:

Istanbul Meeting (November 20‐23, 2013)

Bucharest Meeting (June 11‐14, 2014)

Vienna Meeting (August 30, 2014)

Paris Meeting (October 23‐25, 2014)

Glasgow Meeting (June 4-6, 2015)

Porto Meeting (September 24-25, 2015)