AESOP Annual Congress Gothenburg 2018 - Track #1 PLACES

In times of an increased unsettlement of urban routines relating to global restructuring, ecological disaster, social hardship, international migration and a crisis of liberal democracies, urban professionals are now much more confronted in redefining their own positionality in processes of place-making. Places are increasingly tackled as both potential catalysts of growth and creativity, but also for providing the social glue of cities, regions and urbanized areas. There is a lot of hope invested in what local places could contribute to these salient issues - as enabling spaces of different kinds and for different groups. Considering places as the embodied sphere of everyday life routines, temporalities and contestations creates a conceptual bridge between planners' reason-based principles and aspects such as affect, passion and the body. Emerging city publics appropriate places to render the city a genuine political project (e.g. insurgent movements, co-creation involving refugees etc, and public art). Their action often connects to wider demands for the right to the city and the right to housing. As such, places afford people to create interstitial arenas for (re-)politicising what is often taken as common sense in official spaces of planning politics. Such arenas act as sources of hope towards a just urban future. How can planning approaches account for a hidden potentiality in place-making through more performative approaches in professional praxis and spatial agency? How can urban professionals understand changing forms of (multiple and heterogeneous) place attachment both by newcomers and former residents in processes of planning? Theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions to the "Places" track ideally deal with salient social pressures, cultural demands, ecological concerns, economic drivers and political requirements that target lived urban space. 'Places' are understood as transversal and multi-scalar (urban, regional, national, global) policy fields which require complex translations to become meaningful efforts on the ground. We explicitly welcome contributions that stress current social, cultural and political dilemmas (e.g. youth unemployment, health problems, segregation) in relation to place attachment and place-making processes. How democratic are place-making processes, and what is needed in planning, design and research education to think again about the immanent link between urban space and lived democracy?