International PhD School 2024: Urban Planning for Discontinuity and Radical Transformation
International PhD School organized by TURNS (Tampere University, FI) in collaboration with researchers from Radboud University (NL) and Demos Helsinki (FI).
16-20 June 2024 in Tampere, Finland.
Theme
Urban planning shapes the future. Very often, though, planners fail to recognise varied types and uses of futures they deal with: futures as material continuities; futures as expectations and visions; futures as predictions reflecting data on the past; or futures as unexpected discontinuities and radical transformations.
There have been various attempts to integrate future studies’ methods in planning practices. Through futuring, planners have gained tools to deal with uncertainties and conflicts, eventually approaching the future as a plurality of possible outcomes. However, the fusion of future studies and urban planning lacks both a clear theory and an agreed set of paradigmatic examples. Furthermore, the epistemic status of the future in planning theory remains undefined and contested.
This deficit becomes urgent in the current context where cities and metropolitan regions are increasingly guided by transformative future targets, such as climate neutrality and biodiversity regeneration. Therefore, planning has to refocus on futures (Neuvonen, 2022).
Programme
The PhD School Urban Planning for Discontinuity and Radical Transformation offers an intellectual climate characterized by open debate and shared exploration, not least intended to help you develop your own PhD research further. The four-day programme consists of high-quality lectures by renowned academics from Europe and the U.S., seminars, thematic workshops and urban excursions in Tampere, one of the most interesting and dynamic medium-sized cities in Nordic countries.
The credo of the PhD School builds on the idea that urban planning should be the domain of collective imagination of futures beyond simple transition. Students will work on a new future-regarding epistemic setting to initiate rich and meaningful futures that enable both learning and unlearning. In particular, we propose to operationalise an unlocking, staging and opening of the future by creating tangible Archives of the Futures (Driessche et al. 2023), which help to build practical and lived anticipatory assemblages of discontinuity. Importantly, creating such Archives of the Future will require a process in which (co)production of knowledge moves from a minimalist consensual solution of antagonistic positions towards a co-creative attitude of adversaries (Ache, 2017), in ways that are “constructive, imaginative, and diverse”.
Let us jointly explore how to make using the future in the present explicit in urban planning for transformation!
Responsible academics
- Panu Lehtovuori, Peter Ache and Aleksi Neuvonen
- Co-tutors and guests (to be confirmed): Robert Goodspeed, Kristi Grišakov, Purushottam Kesar, Thomas Machiels, Saija Toivonen
- Coordination: Riina Lundman, Tampere University / TURNS
For any questions, contact Riina Lundman (riina.lundman@tuni.fi).