THEMATIC GROUPS

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Published: 30 July 2025

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

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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:

1. An edited volume entitled Experimental Urbanism and Future Cities with Routledge or Palgrave/McMillan.
2. 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;
3. The creation of an international academic/practitioner blended network UrbEx and associate web-based digital platform to host it
4. 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 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 15th August 2025.

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!

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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!