YA BLOG
a collaboration between young academics

Welcome to the blog of the Young Academics of the Association of the European Schools of Planning. It has a rich history. We welcome your contributions and you can find information on how to contribute and the guidelines here.

Mathare - Future’s Urban Green Oasis

This blog post tells the story of community-led tree-planting activities and youths' efforts in Mlango Kubwa, Mathare, to transform their neighborhood into one that is more conducive to and life-supporting for future generations. Mathare residential area is in Mathare Valley, Nairobi. Mathare is Kenya's second largest informal settlement, home...

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Interview | Beauty in the built environment (Part II)

This is the second part of our interview with two scholars who research what makes cities beautiful. If you missed part one, you can read it here.  Some research on "beautiful cities" has emphasized the economic premium placed on built environments considered particularly aesthetically pleasing. Is there a way to avoid a situati...

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Interview | Beauty in the built environment (part I)

A conversation with two scholars about what makes cities beautiful, and the role of planning in creating beautiful human environments (or not). Aesthetics once played an indispensable role in city-making processes, as anyone who has ever visited a medieval Italian town or a Middle Eastern walled city can attest. These days, while aestheti...

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Shrinking Villages jeopardizing Himalayan future

6 min. read The recently released IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2022 (AR6) echoes the growing concern of risks from climate change as a precursor...

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Operationalizing the 'Just City' – Annual conference of the AESOP Thematic Group of Ethics, Values and Planning.

1 min. Read. Hello AESOP Young Academics. Happy new year! We start this year 2022 by reporting on the annual conference of the AESOP Thematic Group on Ethics, V...

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Emerging collaborative resources for young urbanists and scholars

3 min. read There is an emerging trend within academia, and particularly amongst young academics, to collaborate more freely and produce alternative ways to eng...

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PlaNext-AESOP Call for papers: Special issue Cities in the face of crises: Planning & designing future living environments

5 min. read In our interest for this call to reach further and particularly to Young Academics, we are happy to present the most recent PlaNext (AESOP Young Aca...

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Centering a critical urban geography of disaster-prone areas

8 min. read Natural disasters are often identified in the parlance as 'acts of God', and their human victims, as the costs of encountering a juggernaut. Another...

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Call for Proposals to host the 17th Annual Conference of the YA Network - AESOP

The call for proposals to host the 17th Annual Conference of the Young Academics Network from the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) in 2023 is...

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Introducing the new AESOP YA Coordination Team: Milan Husar

2 min. read Ending with the presentation series of the new members of AESOP YA Coordination Team, today we share the thoughts and personal introduction from Mil...

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Urban Mobility and the Colombian experience: Institutional Failure, Informality and Autonomy.

7 min. read. We continue with our series on themes from the global South, with a short article by our editor-in-chief, Luis Lozano-Paredes. This series on the g...

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How can colour contribute to fostering urban justice?

14 min. read A summary examining the potential of so-called “placemaking” interventions in terms of strengthening urban justice, using the placemaking strategy ...

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The AESOP YA Blog is getting a new design!

2 min read. As we passed the torch to our new YA blog team, one of the decisions we took was to change the aesthetics of the blog to make it more reachable for ...

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Proposed scenarios for assessing Social Resilience of Urban Open Spaces in the “arrival” cities of Greece

22 min. read Authors: Eleni Oureilidou1,*, Konstantinos Ioanidis2 1PhD candidate, School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki2PhD, Associate Pr...

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AESOP Conversations in Planning - Special Issue: Planning Practices and Theories from the Global South

4 min. read + videos Building upon our previous editorial on the Conversations in Planning booklet series focused on a perspective of the global south in associ...

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Perspectives from the Global South: AESOP Booklet on Prof. Vanessa Watson

8 min. read Increasingly, the issue of cities in the global south has gained more attention within urban studies and urban planning academia. In attention to th...

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Research at the intersection of planning and real estate studies

8 min read Guest author: Sara Özogul (University of Amsterdam) Interdisciplinary research is always a challenging undertaking. Planning researchers focusing on ...

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Civil society initiative for user-generated urban development processes: equal partners in post-industrial cities?

Introduction  Cities in diverse contexts experience increasing civil society engagement through neighbourhood-scale, informal and citizen-based interventions. Local expertise provides civil society initiatives with a notable advantage over professional planners and offers the possibility to become place-makers – and ultimately urban planners –...

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