THEMATIC GROUPS

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Published: 04 August 2015

Public Spaces and Urban Cultures (PSUC) is a thematic group established under the umbrella of the Association of the European Schools of Planning (AESOP) as an initiative of Sabine Knierbein (Ass. Prof. - TU Vienna - Austria), Ceren Sezer (Architect and Urban planner - TU Delft, Urban 4 - the Netherlands) and Chiara Tornaghi (Reader - University of Leeds/ Coventry University - United Kingdom) in April 2010. The main aim of the group is to generate an international and an interdisciplinary exchange between the research and the practices on public spaces and urban cultures. By doing so, it aims to support research, planning, and a design agenda within and beyond the AESOP community.  In this paper, we present the members, the organisation, working themes, meetings, and the publications of the PSUC.

The PSUC invites practitioners, academics, governmental and non-governmental professionals, and further interest groups to join the Group’s activities in several ways: by hosting or participating in the Group’s annual meetings, workshops, conferences and roundtables; by initiating new research projects, publications or other types of work (e.g. participation in international expert commissions, consultancies, and as such; by becoming active innovators of academic curricula in urban studies and related fields on the issues of public spaces and urban cultures; and by being active in the online forums and discussions of the Group).

Currently, the PSUC consists of 45 members, who are both researchers and practitioners working with public spaces that are located mainly in Europe, but also in Canada, the United States, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and Bangladesh.

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Planning and Complexity

Published: 06 July 2015

The complexity sciences continue to influence debates, research, and practices in urban planning and governance. Urban systems, e.g. cities and urban regions, can be understood as complex systems, behaving non-linearly and co-evolving with other systems. By now, the number of studies in the realm of the planning and governance of the urban that use concepts and ideas from the complexity sciences has gone up significantly. Naturally, complexity’s increasing popularity also attracts criticism. An often voiced criticism, for instance, is that the applications of complexity in urban planning and governance are little more than semantic novelty.

The right response to such criticism is to examine it and to demonstrate that complexity does have utility in the urban planning for the 21st century. Does complexity science live up to its promises? Now that we have been using complexity in planning for quite a while, we ought to be able to answer that question. During this workshop we discussed in particular the following topics:

-   Research methods: what methods are applied in urban planning and governance research and practice? Why are these methods specific to studying complexity? We invite papers that showcase complexity-informed methods and applications.

-   Complexity-friendly governance arrangements: it is easy to claim that certain cooperation in e.g. a project constitutes an innovative governance arrangement. But is that the case? How persistent is that arrangement? And how innovative is the arrangement anyway, given the many institutional experiments carried out over the past decades? What have the complexity sciences really brought new to the field of planning and governance, if anything?

-   Translating complexity to practice: another popular claim is that the complexity sciences, rather than being an intellectual turn, help practitioners to improve their work. How does that work? Does it really produce better results? What is ‘better’? And compared to what does complexity science produce better results in urban planning and governance?

-   Information technology and planning: information technology has the promise to delve deeper into the complexities of planning by e.g. enabling popular participation or by visualizing possible consequences of decisions. To what extent are these methods informed by complexity sciences? And do they deliver?

OVERVIEW OF THE PRESENTED PAPERS

Day 1: Thursday, February 11th, 2016

Keynote Speech by Dr. Andreas Duit, Stockholm University, The Sense And Non- Sense Of Complexity Concepts: The Case Of Resilience

Track A: Research Methods

• Domenico Camarda & Dario Esposito, Agent-Based Approach For A Complex 
Knowledge Management Framework In Urban Governance
• Mary Ganis, A Small World Network Paradigm For Planning Urban Places For 
People: A Case Study Of South Bank, Brisbane, Australia, 1990-2012


Track B: Complexity-Friendly Governance Arrangements

• Jack Meek, Constructing Resilience In Complex Metropolitan Systems – Metropolitan Water Management As Complex Adaptive System
• Ward Rauws, Navigating Between Control And Spontaneity: An Adaptive Approach To Guiding Urban And Peri-Urban Development

Track C: Translating Complexity to Practice

• Sonja Deppisch, Complexity Meets Local Planning Practice And Politics
• Lauren Ugur, Between Fidelity And Adaptation. Reflections On The Complexity Of Achieving Broad-Based Integrated Violence Prevention In South Africa

Track D: Information Technology And Planning

• Laurent Javaudin, Defining Smartness In The ‘Smart City’ Concept: A Complexity 
Perspective  
• Dilek Unalan, Urban Governance And ITs From Coevolutionary Perspective 

• Sharon Wohl & Sean Wittmeyer, The Smartphone As Urban Mediator And 
‘Sixth-Sense’: A New Platform For Recognizing And Acting Upon The Signals Of 
The City [Discussant: Kuusela/Partanen]
• Sharon Zivkovic, Using A Software Tool Informed By Complexity Theory To Address Complex Wicked Problems 

Day 2: Friday, February 12th 2016

Track A: Research Methods

• Robin Chang, ‘ANT’icipating Complexity In Temporary Use: Two Comparative 
Case Studies In Bremen And Seattle
• Ewald de Bruijn & Lasse Gerrits, A Systematic Review And Taxonomy Of Urban 
Self-Organization



Keynote Speech by Mr. Beese, Technical Leader of the Planning Department Bamberg 



Track B: Complexity-Friendly Governance Arrangements

• Paulo Silva, What Does Complexity Mean For Planning Institutions?  
• Ingmar van Meerkerk & Jurian Edelenbos, Enabling Context For Boundary- 
Spanning Practices Within Complex Urban Governance Networks
• Beitske Boonstra, The Art Of Creating Consistency: Planning Strategies In The Age Of Active Citizenship

Track C: Translating Complexity To Practice

• Frits Verhees, Spatial Planning Practice Through A Complexity-Theoretical Lens: 
Results From Three Case Studies In The Netherlands  
• Alan Mee & Mary Lee Rhodes, Classifying Complexity In Urban Design And 
Governance: The Case Of Ballymun
• Kaisu Kuusela & Jenni Partanen, Plenty Of Planning, Scanty Guidance – The 
Case Of Tampere  

 
Track E: Spontaneous Settlements & Divergent Concepts  

• Yara Manor-Rosner, Sayfan Borghini & Yodan Rofè, Stigmergy In Informal 
Communities, The Unrecognized Bedouin Villages In The Negev, Israel
• Sharon Wohl, Research In Urbanism And Planning Stemming From CAS Theory: 
An Overview Of Divergent Concepts, Frameworks, And Trends

Wrapping Up & Synthesis of the Conference by Dr. Ward Rauws, Coordinator of the AESOP’s Thematic Group on Planning & Complexity

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Transboundary Planning and Governance

Published: 16 June 2015

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Published: 14 April 2015

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

BUILT ENVIRONMENT – SPECIAL ISSUE "PUBLIC SPACES and URBAN JUSTICE"

Guest editors:

Matej Nikšič, Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Gabriel Pascariu, University of Architecture and Urbanism Ion Mincu, Bucharest, Romania

Ceren Sezer, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands

Public Spaces and Urban Justice

Many of the contemporary cities are predominantly shaped by profit-oriented developments in order to achieve economic success and international competition. This is mainly motivated by the global economic model that requires marketing strategies to promote the city into a growth machine (Engelen et. al. 2014, Fainstein 2010, Harvey 2013). Such a vision served to legitimatise costly interventions in prestige developments such as stadiums, inner city historical areas, waterfronts, business hubs for finance, high-tech industries and neighbourhoods for creative industries (Zukin 1995). This implies that in order to support the city’s economic prosperity and global competiveness, the investments were not evenly distributed across the cities but concentrated in some selected areas of a city (Graham & Marvin 2001).

All these processes constitute conditions for the transformation of a city into a more unjust, socially, spatially and economically fragmented form, respectably from the following two aspects:

First is the uneven distribution of wealth, goods, opportunities and general well-being across the urban landscape and populations (Rawls 2071). Privatization in the housing market, increasing land prices, the use of public resources for a limited group of users, customising infrastructural developments for investment enclaves, the proliferation of expensive residential high towers and improvements to enable higher qualities of life in dedicated areas illustrate such a phenomenon. These developments do not only create fragmented city parts, but also cause environmental hazard (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Harvey 2013).

Second is the marginalization of urban groups resulted in: the exclusion of urban poor from privatized social housing market and public spaces, the systematic shrinkage in labour market for certain job skills, the stigmatization of cultural minorities, who do not fit into the development agendas (Zukin 1995). All these processes limit the opportunities for the self-development of individuals or groups and threaten conditions for well-being (Yiftachel et. al. 2009; Young 1990).

In this context, we approach to urban public spaces as grounds to challenge conditions of injustice that threaten the contemporary cities. We imagine the public spaces as places for an expression of urban citizenship. By citizenship, we mean the practices of articulating, claiming and renewing group rights for more fair distribution of goods, services and opportunities, as well as for (co) creation of places (Harvey 2013; Isin 2000; Lefevbre 2003). These can be achieved, for example, through social movements or creative strategies to resist oppressive trends. Such a perspective also opens up the possibility to think about the public space as a platform to access to the public and other amenities. This is clearly connected to mobility patterns, as well as the knowledge and information technologies that support communal cooperation and self-organization (Graham & Marvin 2001). This implies in the end that the old bitten tracks of public space provision as a part of urban planning and design processes need to be challenged.

Given the above, the main question of this issue is: What role can public spaces play in order to achieve a just city?

We propose to approach this question from three different but interrelated perspectives:

1. Public space and representation: What would be the ways of enhancing the quality of public spaces in order to provide opportunities for the marginalized urban groups in claiming their rights in the city?
2. Public space and the distribution of wealth in the city: How can the public space be differently envisioned so that the uneven distribution of wealth in the city could be mitigated?
3. Public space and social cohesion: What would be the ways of enhancing the role of public space to support social cohesion between different urban groups in the context of spatially segregated city?

Our main intention in this special issue thus, is to draw together contributors and case studies from different urban contexts in order to explore and understand what role the public spaces can play to challenge the conditions of injustice in the contemporary city.

References

Engelen, E., Johal, S., Salento, A., Williams, K. (2014). How to built a fairer city. The Guardian, 24 September.

Fainstein, S. S. (2010) The Just City. New York: Cornell University.
Fincher, R., Iveson, K.(2008) Diversity in Planning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Graham, S., Marvin, S.(2001) Splintering Urbanism. London and New York: Routledge.

Harvey, D. (2013) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. Oxford: Blackwell.

Isin, E. (2000) ‘Introduction: democracy, citizenship, and the global city’, in E. Isin (ed) Democracy, Citizenship, and the Global City. London: Routledge.

Lefevbre, H. (2003) The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mitchell, D (2003). The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, New York: The Guildford Press.

Rawls, J.(1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Soja, E. (2010) Seeking Spatial Justice, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota press.

Yiftachel,O, Goldhaber,R. Nuriel, R (2009). “Urban Justice and recognition: Affirmation and Hostility in Beer Sheva” in Connolly, J., Novy, J. Olivo, I. Potter, C. and Steil, J. (eds) Searching for the Just city. London and New York: Routledge.

Young, I.M. (1990). Justice ad the Politics of Difference. Princeton ad New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Zukin, S. (1995). The Cultures of Cities. Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Guidelines for abstracts

Interested professionals from the practical and academic fields 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, 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

The deadline for abstract submission is June 1, 2015. After preliminary review by the special issue and BE editors, the selected authors will be invited to submit full proposals by July 15, 2015 and full papers by September 30, 2015. The publication will be launched in July 2016.

 For any further information please use the e-mail address stated above.