1st Seminar in the ''Where is Urban Politics?'' Series: Utopian Ideals & Concrete Utopias
Join us on Tuesday 15 September for the first seminar of the second season of the Where is Urban Politics? seminar series. This seminar is jointly hosted by the AESOP Thematic Groups Urban Futures and Planning and Complexity.
Details of the talks are as follows:
Utopia – cityscapes between longing and abyss?
Peter Ache (AESOP TG Urban Futures)
The complex metropolitan realities of the urban millennium are difficult to grasp and handle in all their intricacies (Brenner/Schmid, 2015). Still, in professional and political terms, we want to create the ‘spaces for hope’ (Friedmann 2002, Lefebvre 1991, Bloch 1985) which are needed to face actual societal challenges. To be able to do so, we need instruments and processes, or in more general terms, we need a capacity to configure a transformative governance of metropolitan development (Ache/Perrone, forthcoming). Developing visions in shared constellations might be the appropriate way forward (Ache/Perrone, forthcoming). With that, metropolitan regions can re-invent their respective governance settings, on a regular basis and in reflection of their specific characteristics. The talk will use these starting ideas to reflect on evolving cityscapes, utopia in planning or the general need to assess our normative compasses and permanently reinvent our creative and experimental capacities in view of shaping a ‘good city’ (Friedmann, 2002); no more but neither less.
Transforming urban areas for uncertain futures: Is adaptive planning possible in rigid planning systems?
Thomas Machiels (University of Antwerp, AESOP TG Urban Futures)
Urban areas and neighbourhoods must become more adaptable to address contemporary challenges and increasing uncertainties. In spatial planning practice, traditional approaches remain prevalent but often struggle to manage uncertainty effectively. This has spurred a surge in adaptive planning theories and concepts in academic research. However, the practical adoption of adaptive planning remains slow. In this lecture, I use the urban redevelopment case of Oude Dokken in Ghent (Hoefkens and Machiels, 2025) to explore how planners in Flanders stretch the boundaries of a traditionally rigid planning system to operationalise adaptive planning approaches in long-term future visions and plans, ranging from government-led processes to facilitating bottom-up self-adaptivity.
Venue:
Duisenberg Building
Zernike Campus, University of Groningen
Rooms 5412.0035/5412.0039
View the location on the RUG map
The seminar can also be joined online.
More information about this and upcoming seminars can be found on the Where is Urban Politics? website