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.

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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  1300 Hits

How planners can play a key role in addressing the climate crisis

Reading time: 4 minutes Editor's note: This post is part of the permanent call for blog posts to mark the European Climate Pact and Green Deal. Send your contri...

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  1104 Hits

Swarming Landscape – the art of designing for climate adaptation. A book review

In the last decades cities have been responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions. In turn, the effects of climate change such as extreme natural ev...

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  717 Hits

OMG...It is Climate Change! Going through the Encyclical letter "Laudato si'" of the Holy Father Francis on care for our common home

The encyclical letter “Laudato si’” of the Holy Father solicited my curiosity. Thus, I went through it and I summarized some of the most important points that I...

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  626 Hits

COP21: THE PARIS AGREEMENT IN BULLET POINTS

On 11 December 2015, the United Nations 21st Conference of Parties closed its doors. The outcome of this conference is a historical agreement that recognizes th...

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  656 Hits

Earth albedo for beginners: "reflections" on the reason why it has to be included in life cycle assessment*

The Earth has an average planetary albedo of ∽0.3 (Wielicki, Wong, Loeb, Minnis, Priestley, & Kandel, 2005), but considerable differences exist between diff...

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  897 Hits

Urban Heat Island for Beginners: Part 3 *

The Vertical Profile of UHI Any change in the surface energy budget and in the surface temperatures produces effects on urban heat island (UHI) that can be noti...

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  919 Hits

Urban Heat Island for Beginners: Part 2 *

The Two Dimension of the UHI UHI is mainly dependent on the modification of the urban energy fluxes and, as a consequence, on the synoptic conditions in urban a...

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  1111 Hits

Urban Heat Island for Beginners: Part 1 *

The urban population is increasing worldwide and the urban expansion or the increase in urban density can affect both the global and the local climate having co...

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  916 Hits

Placemaking and Climate Resilience

Read time: 3 minutes Author: Konstantina Vidou (UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network – Youth) One could argue that the relationship between placemaking ...

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  1021 Hits

"The times they are (still) a'changing": resources for climate transition

Reading time: 6 minutes In 1964, in times of emerging social change across the USA, Bob Dylan sung prophetically that "the times they are a'changing" whether we...

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  974 Hits

Welcome 2021 - a fresh new start!

Reading time: 3 minutes Goodbye 2020, welcome 2021 Without doubt, 2020 was a challenging year for all of us. Equally, the challenges came with a silver lining. ...

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  763 Hits

COVID-19 and climate resilience: Effective disaster prevention and management practices 

Read time: 7 minutes Guest author: Olga Chepelianskaia (UNICITI) Editor's note: This post shares the findings of two related articles that link the current cris...

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  696 Hits

Cartoons for systemic change & recovery

2 min read We normally change only if we have to. A popular idiom encapsulates this: "Necessity is the mother of invention". If we don't acutely perceive the ne...

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  1006 Hits

Planning around COP25: call for blog posts

The recent UN climate conference COP25 took place in Madrid last December. The conference fell short of consensus in many areas, although many technical issues ...

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  1206 Hits

Top 14 books & events of the 2010s (views from the USA)

Read time: 3-4 minutes As we enter a brand new decade, the American spatial planning community has been generous in providing retrospectives of the past decade....

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  963 Hits

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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  717 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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  793 Hits

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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  1678 Hits

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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  3 Hits