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Symposium: Planning for people 4.5.2011

 

It is now a commonplace to talk about the communicative or cultural turn in urban planning: planners – be they architects, surveyors, geographers or social scientists - are expected to address the social and cultural implications of planning. Meanwhile social and cultural anthropologists have become interested in modern planning institutions and in how politics operates through planning.

This symposium will chart the interesting common ground that these developments have created for anthropology and for planning research. Bringing together speakers from both disciplines, it will work towards a deeper understanding of qualitative research in planning. The symposium will also illuminate issues in other modern expert institutions where the relationship between technical expertise and political values still remains under-theorized and sometimes overlooked.

The main themes to be debated are:

-      the relationship between everyday experiences and planning practices

-      planning institutions and how they understand current political and cultural realities

-      the research tools needed to address problems around participation and local conflicts

With three Finnish and three overseas speakers to kick off the discussion, we look forward to stimulating insights. And we hope to open new avenues for developing and adopting qualitative methods that will enhance research and implementation.

A key element in all these discussions is the new prominence of ethnographic research and other qualitative methodologies across areas formerly more apt to be described as “technical” as opposed to “cultural”, including but not limited to urban planning.

This inter-disciplinary dialogue will present and further develop ideas about how to utilize and combine different qualitative methods usefully. The speakers all have a long track record in research on urban planning in Europe. Expertise in ethnographic methods will be counterposed by the expertise on documentary, qualitative and quantitative data combining softGIS methodology, online and interview-based research methods of planning scholars and practitioners.

This way we hope to start a process of creating more robust and sensitive research tools for the demanding and prominent world of today’s spatial planning. The symposium will thus deepen critical inter-disciplinary understandings of the social dynamics shaping the built environment.

We invite researchers and students of planning, urban politics and social policy, geographers with an interest in planning and/or culture, and anthropologists and sociologists seeking to analyse contemporary global institutions, as well as anyone with an analytical interest in the way urban planning plays out, to join us in charting a realistic and fruitful way forward.

Time: 4.5.2011, from 12:00 to 18:00

Location: Tieteiden talo, Kirkkokatu 6, Helsinki

Programme is here: Symposiumprogramme.pdf

Registration from here: Registration form

Participation fee: 20€

Organised by:

Yhdyskuntasuunnittelun seura ry. (The Finnish Society for Housing and Planning)

Suomen Antropologinen seura ry. (Finnish Antropological Society)

Suomen Kaupunkitutkimuksen seura ry. (The Finnish Society for Urban Studies)

For further questions, please contact:

Eeva Berglund: %20eeva [at] eeva [dot] co [dot] uk (eeva@eeva.co.uk)

or 

Timo Heikkinen: %20timo.heikkinen [at] aalto [dot] fi (timo.heikkinen@aalto.fi), +358-50-5124570