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WELCOME TO OUR JUNE NEWSLETTER
#2|2021 

EURA has a new newsletter! After our first number, announcing our New website (www.eura.org), we are now launching a renovated newsletter: it will come every 2 months and it will try to reach out all to our members and wider community, in order to inform them about EURA and its members.

EURA NEWS

This section presents the main news from our Association

EURA conference 2020-2021 

Dear EURA Members and wider community,

The first EURA online conference has successfully taken place last 6th -7th May 2021: ‘Contradictions shaping urban futures’. It was organised by the Oslo Metropolitan University - OsloMet and University of Oslo, as a follow up and smaller experimental event after the EURA 2020 conference that should have been in Oslo in June 2020 and which was cancelled due to COVId-19 Pandemic.

https://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/research/news-and-events/events/conferences-and-seminars/eura-2021/index.html

68 participants with papers and 205 participants without papers registered and followed the online works, with an average of 13 people following each session. While the two keynote speakers’ presentations, by Robert Beauregard (‘Contradictionsand progress in urban research: The impulse to action’) and Ayona Datta (‘The distant-time of the future city’) have been followed by 70 people. Colleagues from EU, and also from the rest of the world joined the sessions and key-lectures, offering EURA an interesting opportunity for becoming more and more international.

The key-note speech of Robert Beauregard and the final panel discussion "The generative potential of urbancontradictions – growth vs. degrowth are online at the NEW EURA YouTube channel: please follow the link to this first material animating this new opportunity for dissemination and communication.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzwG6k7Vk4hENEqN_pghqHw

A book of abstract is available, collecting all the abstract of the papers presented.
https://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/research/news-and-events/events/conferences-and-seminars/eura-2021/book-of-abstracts-eura2021.pdf

The conference was also the opportunity to assign EURA Young Scholars Award. Congratulations to Lina Zhang from TU Dortmund who got the award for her PhD paper: ‘Social Sustainability Assessment of Affordable Housing Planning in Shanghai Based on primary School Distribution’

It was the first time we experimented with this opportunity for an online academic conference among international urban scholars. We discovered new opportunities and we are convinced that online activities can be a good opportunity for differentiating EURA offers. We look forward for your feedback and we would like to hear from you! Please, if you have time, fill in this short survey to let us know your feelings and reactions, so that we can build on them for our future work! 
https://forms.gle/d2duQBJHtc8aczk88

EURA General Assembly and Governing Board meeting

EURA General Assembly will be held on 16th of July, in the afternoon. Members will receive the official invitation and dedicated link: the meeting will be on-line and we will also forward indications for the ballot: in fact, this EURA General Assembly is also due to elect the new EURA president. The Board Meeting will be held on 16th of July in the Morning, Members will receive the dedicated link. 

ELECTIONS AND DATES 

This year, we renovate the President: Valeria Fedeli has served as a President since June 2018 and now we have a new candidate, Prof. Filipe Teles. 

Filipe Teles is a political scientist in the Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, where he teaches courses in the fields of Public Policy and Political Science. Presently, he is acting as Prorector for Regional Development and Urban Policies. He holds a PhD in Political Science and is a member of the Research Unit on Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policy (GOVCOPP), where he has developed research work on governance and local government, territorial reform, political leadership and innovation.

EURA Conversations


EURA Conversations continues to provide a space to share insights on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cities and on urban studies.  

Conversations that have appeared since the last EURA Newsletter in early April are as follows:

#22 Greenspace under lockdown
EURA Conversations Post #22 – 12 April 2021
by Danielle Sinnett

#23 Portuguese municipalities and education in times of pandemic
EURA Conversations Post #23 – 25 April 2021
by Maria Antònia Pires de Almeida

#24 Africa
EURA Conversations Post #24 – 10 May2021
by Costanza la Mantia

# 25 Public space
EURA Conversations Post #25 – 24 May 2021
by Evangelia Athanassiou

# 26 A Caribbean perspective 
EURA Conversations Post #26 – 7 June 2021
by Julia R. Kotzebue

# 27 Rewilding  
EURA Conversations Post #27 – 21 June 2021
by Siân Moxon


Please consider contributing a Conversation piece to the series.  To offer your 500 word contribution please email to: secretariat@eura.org

See all the conversations at this link 

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NEWS FROM OUR MEMBERS 

This section presents the main news from our Members: books, events, job positions, you are all invited to contribute!

New book

A Modern Guide to National Urban Policies in Europe, 2021, Elgar Modern Guides. Edited by Karsten Zimmermann, Faculty of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund University, Germany and Valeria Fedeli, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, DAStU-Politecnico di Milano, Italy

This book is the outcome of the collaboration set under the EURA working group on National Urban Policies. It tries to provide an overview and comparison of urban challenges and national urban policies in 13 European countries, addressing key issues such as housing, urban regeneration and climate change. The book covers Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Norway, Sweden, France, UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Slovakia, Italy, and Romania. It is the result of an initiative that emerged in the context of the European Urban Research Association during the annual conferences in 2018 and 2019 and the outcome of a Working Group promoted on this issue. The main aim of such initiatives is to promote research spaces, which can count on our ordinary research, rather than dedicated research findings. The book in this respect reflects one of the main aims of EURA, an interdisciplinary and international research association, born in the late nineties with the objective of promoting an open and constructive dialogue between theory and practice. We hope this book can provide our colleagues, from different disciplinary fields, looking at urban policies, interesting elements for further reflection and for feeding new research projects and working groups, dealing with the many open questions and dilemmas this books highlights.

It cab be downloaded with a free open source licence, here

  

Open positions and jobs

The Department of Architecture of Urban Studies of the Politecnico di Milano (DASTU), with the contribution of Associazione di Fondazioni e Casse di Risparmio Italiane SpA (ACRI) announces the call for n. 7 Visiting Young Investigator in the context of the Planning for Social Justice Conference that will be held the first week of October 2021.

Deadline for application:
27 June 2021

The 2021 program includes

• The participation in the International conference Planning for Social Justice, which will take place the first week of October in Milan or eventually on line

• The active participation in other seminars related to the main conference, which will take place during the visiting period and anyway by the end of the year 2021;

• A visiting period of minimum one month as researcher in one of the leading Italian universities participating in the program, which are located in the cities of Milan, Turin, Florence, Palermo, Venice, Rome, Naples.

The candidates will have the opportunity to work in internationally recognized research centers of Architecture and Planning within the following universities: Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani (DAStU); Università degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Architettura (DIDA); Politecnico di Torino, Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio (DiST); Università degli studi di Palermo, Dipartimento di architettura (D’ARCH); Università IUAV di Venezia, Dipartimento di culture del Progetto; Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Dipartimento di Architettura; Sapienza Università di Roma, Dipartimento di Pianificazione, design, tecnologia dell’architettura. (see Annex 1).

7 full reimbursements of minimum € 2.400,00 for each successful candidates.

The opportunity to publish a paper in a book and/or in the journals of the universities departments after the Conference and the visiting period. The papers will undergo through a peer review process.

The opportunity to watch remotely the kick-off meeting of the Planning for Social Justice Conference which has taken place the 14 of May 2021, during which the research centers will be introduced.

https://www.dastu.polimi.it/planning-for-social-justice-yitp/

 

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A WINDOW ON OUR MEMBERS

This section opens a window on our Members, asking new members and consolidated ones to present themselves afresh. The idea is to provide a simple description, with some photos and pictures presenting the main activities in the fields of teaching and research, you are all invited to contribute!

The University of Aveiro (UA) - https://www.ua.pt - was founded in 1973 and is widely recognized as one of the most innovative universities in Portugal, for the quality of its teaching and research and for its cooperation with national and international organizations. Its structure fosters interdisciplinarity and flexibility, as well as openness to society and close links to the local institutional and business context. The UA is one of the best universities, under 50 years, for the Times Higher Education Young University Rankings. It has 20 research centers, 95% of which have been classified as very good or excellent in the last international evaluation process promoted by the National Foundation for Science and Technology. One of its units, the Research Center on Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policies (https://www.ua.pt/en/govcopp), clearly states in its mission the contribution to good practices in governance in specific urban and regional contexts. This interdisciplinary research center (with a total of 120 researchers from political science, urban planning, economics, public administration, tourism, environmental sciences, …) has been on the top 3 research units on social sciences in Portugal and is a privileged partner in several international projects. Internationalization is of major importance to the UA since its foundation. A small institution just 47 years ago, is now a community of 18 thousand students, collaborators, researchers, and faculty members, coming from 90 different nationalities.

 

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URBAN RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

This section presents information on the latest issue of our journal Urban Research and Practice, Taylor & Francis

Urban Research & Practice, Volume 14, Issue 2 (2021)

The latest issue of Urban Research and Practice is online, please visit the Journal at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rurp20/current?gclid=Cj0KCQjwk4yGBhDQARIsACGfAetIKlJlGHpSvA5h4S8WU90SCZANIsQ4uNDYA32wIpLoJaV8RmS1X6UaAloxEALw_wcB

to discover the latest articles and get access to the complete collection.