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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Small Towns

Published: 21 August 2025

First European Lecture Series on Small Towns will start in autumn/winter 2025. This lecture series explores current research and practices relating to the development of small and medium-sized towns in selected European countries. It discusses ongoing spatial dynamics, ranging from small neighbourhoods and inner cities to regional and national perspectives. These dynamics are closely linked to political debates and planning strategies in the relevant countries, as well as to the wider European context. Small towns are not only peripheral -both geographically and mentally- but also represent strategic stepping stones for large-scale spatial issues and future development challenges. This applies to the quality of services in regions undergoing demographic change and housing provision in both metropolitan areas and decentralised regions. Small and medium-sized towns are therefore confronted with questions of adaptability and renewal in existing settlement areas, as well as questions of innovation. We explore how current and future planning cultures can be inspired by small towns and what lessons can be learned from the experiences of various European towns. This lecture series brings together scholars and experts from a variety of disciplines across Europe. It addresses researchers, students and practitioners alike.

AESOP_TG_Small_Towns_Lecture_Series_Programm_2025.pdf

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Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS

Category: Planning/Conflict

Published: 01 August 2025

Registration is now open until 15 August.

Please register at the following link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNWPO24gMGyikIk3Kpnw0mGw2ukkHVAfBbYuLGES1KOFMBRw/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=101925520454545353151

Call for papers closed on 15 July.

A final program of the conference will be available after the closing of registrations.

Best regards

the Organizers and Scientific Committee

‘Contested urban policy: breeding concrete utopias’

AESOP Planning/Conflict thematic conference 2025

Contacts:

https://www.tu.berlin/en/planningtheory/research-publications

Conference link:

http://www.planningtheory.tu-berlin.de

AESOP Planning/Conflict thematic group link:

https://aesop-planning.eu/thematic-groups/planning-conflict

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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.