VI - YA Network | AESOP Young Academics Network
Permanent URI for this community
The AESOP Young Academics Network is a loosely structured branch of AESOP, which encourages the active participation and exchange of academic work from PhD students to Post-docs and those starting out in academic positions. The YA Network provides a platform through which the academic leaders of tomorrow can share ideas in an open and inclusive environment, challenging and supporting one another in the attainment of superior academic output. The young academics network has two core aims:
- Make AESOP a challenging environment for young academics;
- Open up the structure of AESOP to better encourage young academic involvement.
- Make AESOP a challenging environment for young academics;
- Open up the structure of AESOP to better encourage young academic involvement.
Browse
Browsing VI - YA Network | AESOP Young Academics Network by Issue Date
Now showing 1 - 20 of 97
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Publication Open Access Deleuze and Guattari: Jean Hiller in conversation with Gareth Abrahams(AESOP, 2013-07) Hiller, Jean; Abrahams, GarethThis publication is structured around a number of ‘conversations with planners’. But, we might ask, what do we mean when we talk about a conversation, and what is this conversation for? This question is considered in Deleuze’s work with Claire Parnet (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002). Deleuze argues that most conversations are structured around a number of dualisms both in the form of the conversation (the interviewer/interviewee; the question/answer), and the content of the conversation (do you think this or that?) These dualisms, he argues, can often lead us into instances in which the ‘aim is not to answer questions (but) to get out’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 1). This is made all the more problematic, he suggests, because most questions are ‘already worked out on the basis of the answers assumed to be probable according to the dominant meanings’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 15). Thus, rather than creating something new, these questions and answers re-trace taken-for-granted relationships between selected ideas. ‘Western democratic conversation between friends’ write Deleuze and Guattari, ‘has never produced the slightest concept’ (1994: 6). If we should focus our attention on creating concepts, as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) suggest, then should we discard conversations as a meaningful contribution to such an exercise?Item Open Access An anatomy of hope(AESOP, 2015) Torisson, Frederik‘So, it is the crisis of the idea of revolution. But behind the idea of revolution is the crisis of the idea of another world, of the possibility of, really, another organization of society, and so on. Not the crisis of the pure possibility, but the crisis of the historical possibility of something like that is caught in the facts themselves. And it is a crisis of negation because it is a crisis of a conception of negation which was a creative one.’(Alain Badiou)The paper seeks to elaborate on the concept of hope and the possibility of a ‘politics of hope’that goes beyond negation in relation to contemporary architectural practice. The focus will be on the affective modality of hope, the intra-personal, as opposed to the common understanding of hope as a personal feeling. Following Ernst Bloch’s notion of hope as ‘anticipatory consciousness’, the paper discusses the limitations and potentials of the principle of hope in contemporary spatial practices using Brecht’s dictum ‘something’s missing’ as a starting point for thinking about hope as a cognitive instrument. In a post-modern society, the notion of an ‘outside’ is hardly conceivable. The alternative orders of society imagined are almost invariably mirrors of what already is; these could be called utopias of compensation. At the same time, there has over the last couple of years been a rapid increase in instances of political upheaval, and the words change and hope are heard increasingly often in political discussion, signalling a dynamism as well as an openness in political discussion that goes well beyond the ideologies of the 20th century. Hope is in other words here understood as transformative; the concept is interlinked with the prospect of change. Hope is as an operative concept capable of a double move, simulta-neously being critical and propositional. The critical aspect is implicit in the connection to change; it denotes a desire for a different world than what is. The propositional aspect implies a direction and the exploration of an alternative. Hope in relation to spatial practices is thus concerned with the experimentation along the edge of the current doxai – challenging them and seeking to extend them.Item Open Access Brazilian uprising : The spatial diffusion of protests during the June Journeys and the politics of identity(AESOP, 2015) Gonçalves de Almeida, Rafael; da Silveira Grandi, MatheusBrazil experienced, in June of 2013, the largest popular demonstrations in its recent history —an event that has been called the June Journeys. In this paper, we briefly address briefly the processes of spatial diffusion and dispersion observed during these journeys. We then reflect on how these processes relate to a politics of identity, and the strategies used by protesters to differentiate themselves from other groups, and by the State to classify the protesters in order to guide the use of police repression. Identity can, therefore, group individuals around a common struggle using as reference the location of the demon-stration as ‘spaces of identity reference’, but can also play an important role in the reproduction of dominant power relations by creating mechanisms with which to legitimate punitive action. The ‘vandal’ is, then, understood as the identity constructed to allow the transition from an indirect regulation to a mode of violent intervention. We conclude the paper by emphasising how both of these processes highlight the role of the politics of identity on this recent series of demonstrations in Brazil.Item Open Access Editorial introduction Vol. 1 (2015) : On the entangled paths of urban resistance, city planning and heritage conservation(AESOP, 2015) Hou, Jeffrey; Hammami, FerasResistance, planning and conservation may seem like parallel or combating universes – while resistance almost always entails actions against the state institutions, planning and conservation practices function typically with and within them. These seemingly disen- gaged modalities of social and political processes came together as the focus of the 8th Annual AESOP Young Academics Conference, titled “Cities that Talks” that took place in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2014. The conference theme and an impressive array of case studies reflect the recent surge of urban resistance movements in Europe and elsewhere in the world. They also reflect a substantial level of interest among young academic scholars who, as a generation of young people, are themselves faced with social and political upheavals–including, but not limited to, the current impacts of neoliberal restructuring and austerity policies that percolate through the society today.Item Open Access Foreword Vol. 1 (2015) : Coral feefs, fresh streams and deep oceans in the future of planning research: Introducing plaNext in the framework of AESOP policies and strategies(AESOP, 2015) Lo Piccolo, FrancescoI am happy to introduce the first volume of plaNext as one of the most challenging initiatives of our association. What is plaNext? plaNext is an open access online journal intellectually produced and managed by AESOP Young Academics. plaNext is published as part of the AESOP online publishing platform, InPlanning. It is an international peer- reviewed journal. It arises from the collective work of our community. And so, plaNext is many things at the same time.Item Open Access The shape of knowledge redistribution within planning cultures : The question of resistance in the case of a large-scale urban development project in Vienna(AESOP, 2015) Peer, ChristianWith the beginning of the 21st century a series of large-scale urban development projects (LUDPs) were planned alongside the transformation or modernization of federal railway stations in Vienna. Herein, in October 2012 the City of Vienna together with the landowner set the course for a telling modified urban development project: the new general concept for the former railway station Wien Nordbahnhof. Just a stone’s throw away from the city’s center a new generation of citizens will find its home close or within the typological setting of an experimental superstructure, that is one of today’s biggest inner-city transformation zones, originally called the future city (“Stadt der Zukunft”). According to the city planners’ intentions the Nordbahnhof will be finished until the year of 2025 after a development process of more than three decades and a multifaceted process of public participation. The long period of development led to illuminating different imaginations of the future city and to a particular materialization of the shift of planning ideology into urban form, which accentuates a dialectical process of transformation. This paper focuses on crucial acts of resistance playing a role for the interplay of democracy and innovation within the transformation process in question.Item Open Access Re-designing commons in Italy(AESOP, 2015) Vianello, MicheleThe paper gives a critical account of the recent Italian debate on Commons concentrating on some theoretical problems, with reference to two different components: the economic research on the Commons, the juridical research on the property nature of Commons. It then puts them in parallel with the social demands arisen, articulated around the buzzword “Commons”. The mutual relationship among these components is analysed, stressing the generative aspects of the encounter between scholarship on one hand and the social, discursive use of the Commons concept on the other hand. Finally a research agenda based on the results of such analysis is proposed in order to re-compose the mentioned duality and partially overcome the difficulties that today harness the Italian debate on the Commons and its possible applications in urban planningItem Open Access Safety and agonistic conceptions of public life(AESOP, 2015) Berglund Snodgrass, LinaThis paper seeks to enable for conceptual resistance towards a desirable urban order of ‘safe public realms’, to which the ‘planning for safety’ directly contributes. One way of engaging in that kind of resistance is by contributing to politicising the system of beliefs informing planning for safety. Planning for safety is primarily legitimised morally as the ethically right thing to do given the identified violation of a human right in the public realm, the right to freely move about in the public environment. By drawing from Mouffean agonistic political theory (2005), there is no given interpretation nor implementation of ethical principles such as human rights, but rather different interpretations given what point of reference one is departing from, and should hence be subjected to political struggle. To conceptually set the arena for choice contributes to politicising phenomena which previously have been legitimised as the right or the (only) natural thing to do. ‘Planning for safety’ should therefore be interpreted resting on specific ideological assumptions of public life which frames both how ‘the human right’ is conceptualised as well as what planning solutions are considered possible.This article seeks to establish alternative conceptualisations of public life, with an aim to make visible how there is not one notion of public life and thereby re-politicise the ideolo-gical premises underpinning ‘safety planning’ and thereby allow for conceptual resistance. This is carried out by establishing a discursive field of public life, a kind of conceptual arena for choice making. The discursive field is represented by four different discourses of public life centred around different ideals such as rational, dramaturgical, conflictual and consensual public life. In this conceptual context, lines of conflict have been discerned based on a thematic of purpose, character, criteria for participation and conception of identities, which have taken the form of agonistic dimensions, from which planning discursively can position itself. This paper argues that we first must agonistically agree on what notion of public life should govern the development of our cities, and thereafter discuss what the consequences would be for planning.Publication Open Access Faludi - Introducing a Theory of Planning(AESOP, 2015-04) Mukhopadhyay, ChandrimaProfessor Andreas Faludi is popularly known for taking a new approach towards planning theory in the history of planning education in the UK. He is an honorary member of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP). After serving his term as Professor of Spatial Planning Systems in Europe at Delft University of Technology, he has recently been appointed a Senior Professor of Spatial Planning at the Department of Planning and Media Design at Blekinge Institute of Technology at Karlskrona in Sweden for teaching a course at the MSc programme on ‘European Spatial Planning and Regional Development’. On the 13th of June 2014 Faludi received an honorary Doctorate from University of Groningen, the Netherlands, for his groundbreaking work regarding the discipline of spatial planning. He started his career as a planning theorist through his appointment to write Planning Theory, accompanied by A Reader in Planning Theory, during the early 1970s. Pergamon Press commissioned it in reaction to the Royal Town Planning Institute’s curriculum for recognised planning schools. This booklet celebrates the completion of forty years since publication of his pioneering books in 1973.Publication Open Access Innes: The Evolution of Communicative Planning Theory(AESOP, 2015-10) Machler, Leonard; Milz, DanJudith Innes is Professor Emerita of City & Regional Planning at University of California, Berkley. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and an undergraduate degree in English from Harvard University. Innes is one of the proponents and main contributors towards communicative planning. As the authors mention in the booklet, she built communicative planning up from a concept into a practicable craft.Item Open Access Critical Cities volume 3 Ideas, knowledge and agitation from emerging urbanists(AESOP, 2016) Tanulku, BasakInequality is a matter of everyday life and cities are places where inequality is experienced more violently. As Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield argue, cities, particularly large metropolises are sites to generate and reproduce inequalities, a similar process seen in different parts of the world. They suggest this is a result of what they call the “urban industry”. Critical Cities Volume 3—the third in a series published by “This Is Not a Gateway” (TINAG) platform—is an attempt to explore various urban inequalities. The editors, Naik Deepa and Trenton Oldfield, are actively involved in bringing forward various forms of inequalities related to cities. They formed the platform, which organizes the annual festival bringing together a wide variety of people working on and interested in urban issues. They also run Myrdle Court Press, an independent publishing house, and organise “Salons” to discuss urban and spatial issues. In addition, Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield also advise various cultural and not-for-profit organisations, charities, private businesses, independent publishers and organises courses, produces articles for a range of publications, prepares lectures, and presents research findings at various conferences, festivals and similar events.Item Open Access Editorial introduction : Questioning planning, connecting places and times Introduction to the special issue(AESOP, 2016) Tulumello, Simone; Healy, PatsyLet us open this editorial introduction in an unusual way, made possible by plaNext’s innovative approach to peer-review. Let us quote a paragraph from one of the reviews to the articles of this issue, namely the review by Marco Allegra to Ignacio Castillo Ulloa’s article. One might suspect that this is a simplistic account of the functioning of the planning process: planners, after all, might be creative in their work; take risks (or not); simply rely on their professional expertise, but also use it in a strategic way to negotiate their role in the policy process; display a number of alternative, ‘non-planning strategies’; follow a private, particularistic or political agenda (rather than planning handbooks) in doing their job; cheat, lie, manipulate their clients, colleagues or the stakeholders in general. In sum, what the author presents as a dispute between two irreconcilable logics – between the rational, positivistic planner and the hysteric residents – might be part of a broader interaction between a ‘planner- actor’ and all the other participants to the planning processItem Open Access Editorial introduction Vol 2 (2016) : plaNext New ideas and perspectives on planning(AESOP, 2016) Hammami, FerasThis volume marks an important stage in plaNext. It publishes original works following an open call, as the special-issue inaugural volume was dedicated to selected contributions from the 8th AESOP-YA annual conference. With the growing interest in plaNext, we see a bright future as a leading open access journal in planning and other related fields. Thanks to the generous contribution of AESOP, all articles are openly available at AESOP’s digital platform, InPlanning, and authors do not pay any article processing fee. In this respect, we envision plaNext as an effort by the young academic community of AESOP to help free the dissemination of knowledge from any unjust global academic system.Item Open Access Honolulu rail transit International lessons from : Barcelona in linking urban form, design, and transportation(AESOP, 2016) Boeing, GeoffThe city of Honolulu, Hawaii is currently planning and developing a new rail transit system. While Honolulu has supportive density and topography for rail transit, questions remain about its ability to effectively integrate urban design and accessibility across the system. Every transit trip begins and ends with a walking trip from origins and to destinations: transportation planning must account for pedestrian safety, comfort, and access. Ildefons Cerd ’s 19th century utopian plan for Barcelona’s Eixample district produced a renowned, livable urban form. The Eixample, with its well-integrated rail transit, serves as a model of urban design, land use, transportation planning, and pedestrian-scaled streets working in synergy to produce accessibility. This study discusses the urban form of Honolulu and the history and planning of its new rail transit system. Then it reviews the history of Cerd ’s plan for the Eixample and discusses its urban form and performance today. Finally it draws several lessons from Barcelona’s urban design, accessibility, and rail transit planning and critically discusses their applicability to policy and design in Honolulu. This discussion is situated within wider debates around livable cities and social justice as it contributes several form and design lessons to the livability and accessibility literature while identifying potential concerns with privatization and displacement.Item Open Access From apophenia to epiphany Making planning theory-research-practice co-constitutive(AESOP, 2016) Castillo Ulloa, IgnacioThis paper addresses the question of how planning research could be reasserted to balance the relationship between theory and practice. To that end, a twofold approach is taken: on the one hand, different interrelations among planning theory, research and practice are set out building on Jacques Lacan’s ‘four discourses’—the master’s, the university’s, the hysteric’s and the analyst’s. On the other hand, a process to formulate the plan regulador (local normative master plan) of a canton in southern Costa Rica is drawn upon, through storytelling, to shed light on the aforementioned relations. The article’s in-conclusion is that among planning theory, research and practice, rather than a synergic co-constitution, linkages that challenge, occlude, bypass or control one another are generated. Moreover, due to the apophenic ability of universal(izing)-technocratic(ized) theories to obviate the ‘right measure’ between action and reaction, discourses of research and practice are manipulated and the role of theory as ‘master signifier’ upheld. However, the ‘counter-discourses’ of both the hysteric and the analyst could be articulated by a planning ‘critical-hysterical’ research, which, in turn, would allow epiphanies to come to the fore, separate action from reaction and, pragmatically and dynamically, co-constitute planning theory, research and practice.Item Open Access Foreword Vol. 3 (2016) : Questioning planning, connecting places and times(AESOP, 2016) Geppert, AnnaIt is a pleasure to write a foreword for the third volume of plaNext, dedicated to ‘Differences and Connections: Beyond Universal Theories in Planning, Urban, and Heritage Studies’. This volume publishes six papers selected from the YA conference held on this topic in Palermo in March 2015, thanks to the support of Francesco Lo Piccolo, at the time acting President of AESOP. Published since 2015, plaNext is a peer-reviewed journal, created and edited by the AESOP Young Academics Network. Since the beginning, AESOP has supported this initiative for two reasons.Item Open Access The city as a witness of social and political changes : Analysis of post-war reconstruction of Minsk as a Soviet urban model(AESOP, 2016) Smirnova, AliaksandraIn contemporary urban studies, the physical reconstruction of cities is achieving a new dimension, which is reflected in the urban resilience that is expressed as the physical, social, cultural and economic capability of urban structures to respond to anthropogenic or natural catastrophes. In this paper, we study the reconstruction processes of Minsk, Belarus, which was almost completely destroyed and rebuilt as a new city after World War II, in order to understand in which way specific social and political conditions may have influence on the physical rebuilding of urban and architectural form in “devastated” cities. We based our analysis on study of Master Plans from different periods. In particular, we focused on the Master Plan 1946 analysing its specific characteristic and linking them to political and social circumstances of post-war period. We conclude that Minsk was reconstructed as a model for a new Soviet city that brings us to a question: could the Soviet architecture and urbanism fill the void in Minsk’s urban heritage?Item Open Access Systemic constellations in spatial planning processes : A method to visualise questions of power and cultural peculiarities?(AESOP, 2016) Levin-Keitel, MeikeComing from a systemic point of view, systemic constellations focus on the complex interplay of different elements in order to come to a better understanding of the whole system. Spatial planning, which involves complex decision-making in an uncertain environment, is eventually able to profit from such a different methodology. In this context, the aim of the article is to implement systemic constellations as method for spatial research in two different ways: first, to visualise questions of power in planning processes, and, second, to visualise cultural influences in planning processes. The article concludes that the method of systemic constellations serves to visualise questions of power and is able to highlight important differences at a glance, even though this method does not meet all of the scientific requirements academia asks for. The specific contribution is that this method will be able to enrich the dialogue between theory and practice for a daily use, to make complex problems clearly visible and easier to handle.Item Open Access The spatialisation struggle : The heritage of open spaces in Baghdad(AESOP, 2016) Van de Ven, AnneliesThis article explores the significance of open space to the formation of local culture and identity. Rejecting any absolute categorisation of open-public and closed-private space, the essay attempts to redefine open space, in order to make it more suitable to specific case studies outside the western democratic discourse within which it is often used. Space is a process, shaping the world around it as much as it is shaped by its own circumstances. This also implies that the experience of space is highly pluralistic, a notion made exceedingly clear in the changing structure and meaning of space throughout Baghdad’s history. In light of recent crises in Baghdad the discussion of its spaces has become critical. By analysing the evolution of Baghdad from a spatial perspective, I will explore how embodied experiences interact with the cognitive readings of space within the case of Baghdad. I aim to show the significance of open space to the self-identification of an urban population. This to suggest its immense value to the improvement of cultural heritage management, especially in conflict areas.Item Open Access Understanding resilience in urban slums Lessons from Pedda-Jalaripeta, India(AESOP, 2016) Andavarapu, Deepika; Arefi, MahyarSlums are typically perceived as substandard eyesores, corrupt, makeshift, impoverished and crime-ridden. The growing literature on resilience challenged these perceptions, and promoted new debates on their ingenuity and adaptability to overcome external circumstances. Yet these debates are often limited to short term coping and adaptive capacity of slum dwellers. In this paper we look at long-term transformation of a slum over a forty-year period. Holling’s Adaptive Cycle model is a useful tool to study the transformations occurring within a slum. The four phases of the adaptive cycle are: conservation (K), creative destruction/release (Ω), reorganization (α) and exploitation (r). The Ω and α phases are together known as the “backloop” and are the focus of this paper. This paper explores how the residents of Pedda Jalaraipeta slum in Visakhapatnam use their social capital (bonding, bridging and linkages) to survive and recover from disasters. Based on empirical ethnographic findings, this paper shows that when slum dwellers collaborate with government or non-government agencies their community can recover and retain its unique social and cultural identity.