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.

Social Enterprise, made in France – helping people and planet?

Spatial planning, at its best, can facilitate sustainable development. Planning policies, however, are no silver bullet for the implementation of sustainable de...

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YA conference summary & selective list of upcoming planning conferences

One of the last major spatial planning events was the 12th AESOP Young Academics conference, held at the University of Groningen 26-29 March 2018. Following las...

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UX for the city

In this post I explore how the notion of User Experience (UX), a key dimension of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), can enhance urban planning. Applying user-ce...

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The smart, resilient city: cliché or oxymoron?

The smart city concept builds on technological and governance innovations to better enable cities to face up to urbanisation challenges, including the ability t...

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  363 Hits

Smarter past, smarter future: lessons for smart cities

The smart city is much discussed as a sustainable urban development model. However, as discussed in former posts on the blog, “smartness” is in the eye of the b...

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  355 Hits

Toward Inclusive Cities 3.0 – aligning public participation with people

Is participatory planning about engaging everyone and making cities inclusive? Or about satisfying those who speak the loudest? These difficult questions affect...

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Framing the right research questions in dealing with Urban Resilience: introducing Urban Resilience Research Network (URNet)

One of the main challenges in dealing with research is indeed framing the right questions. Einstein's quote “if I had one hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 ...

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Public participation in the 3rd Millenium: making cities more sustainable?

The UN Summit Habitat III is just months away. At a critical time for climate change and sustainable development, public participation has a vital role to play ...

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Water ATMs in India: innovation, smart technology, and new form of governance

Chandrima Mukhopadhyay, India Govt of India recognized the term 'start up' in April, 2015, which started as private sector initiated business models by small-sc...

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Living and moving around in a post-earthquake city

Seven years ago, during the night of 6 April 2009 the city of L’Aquila suffered one of the most tragic events in the modern history of Italy. At 3:32 A.M. a sei...

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How could urban design embrace change and uncertainty?

Guest author: Alessandra Feliciotti. Urban Design Studies Unit – UDSU, Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Uk We know nothing: the e...

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From Green-washing to Carbon-washing: True Smart and Green Cities?

I’d like to share here some thoughts among us, in the light of the recent agreement reached in Paris at the COP21, and respect to some emerging issues when fram...

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Framing Urban Resilience within the UN Sustainable Development Goals: still gaps between theory and policy guidelines?

This weekend, 25 - 27 September 2015, more than 150 world leaders will attend the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit, in New York, to formally adopt ...

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  388 Hits

A Global Virtual Roundtable on How to Measure, Why to measure, Cities Resilience

Since more than a decade, urban resilience has entered political agendas worldwide, academic debates, and within this blog specific interest, planning debates. ...

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  491 Hits

The system of spatial planning in Poland: time for a change?

A completely new system of spatial planning has been created in Poland after the fall of socialism. In comparison to the previous one, it has no longer been bas...

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Revealing a new era of planning, the Lisbon case

The municipality of Lisbon through a public participation procedure for cycling investments, shows the need for a more economic and human-centric city. In recen...

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Highlights from 2017

2017 was a year of continued growth for the blog, buildingimages/easyblog_images on 2016. It saw 8,400 views and 5,700 visitors, for 19 published posts. The map...

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Social disruption and complexity: Transformative power of crises

Reading time: 10 minutes Guest authors: Pinar Dörder (chair of the YA Coordination Team; Darmstadt University of Technology) and Flavia Giallorenzo (University ...

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Read time: 4-5 minutes2018 was the year which generated the most traffic on the blog: 13,000 views and 9,300 visitors for 29 published posts. The posts covered ...

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Sitopia: how food shapes the city

Author: Ian Babelon (Northumbria University)On Wednesday 6 November 2019, I had the pleasure to attend Carolyn Steel's public lecture at Newcastle University wh...

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