Edit (10.1.2022): The deadline for the session proposals has been extended to January 14th, 2022.
Sustainability is a topical, multidimensional, and historically changing research topic. The sustainability of cities and city regions is key for solving future challenges. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and the percent of the global population living in urban areas is projected to increase to nearly 70% by 2050. Urbanization is connected to other broad developments, such as climate change, population growth, decreased biodiversity and growing societal inequality. Implications range from health effects to changes in ecosystems and the formation of people’s identities. Many sustainability challenges intensify in urban environments, so cities play an important role in solving them.
Urban sustainability can be approached, for example, from the perspectives of environmental, economic, social, and cultural sustainability. In practice these dimensions are intertwined, which means that a transformation towards a more sustainable city requires systems thinking, as well as combining the perspectives of multiple disciplines. Also, urban imaginaries and analyses of the past play an important role in producing future possibilities and solutions.
The Urban Studies Conference 2022 calls for sessions around the theme of sustainable cities. The sessions can be based on empirical research or theoretical/conceptual examination of sustainability and cities.
The aim of the conference is to discuss various dimensions and meanings of urban sustainability. How is urban sustainability defined and what kind of sustainability is needed? Is the urban lifestyle sustainable? What kind of value conflicts and uncertainties are related to sustainable solutions, and how can multi- and transdisciplinary collaboration foster change towards more sustainable cities? How are technology and digitalization entangled with the social and spatial construction of cities? Who uses power in defining sustainability? What kind of interpretations are made about urbanization, sustainability, and urban communities, when the perspectives of different generations, groups of people, materiality and multiple species meet in culturally and socially diversifying societies? How has urban sustainability been approached before and how can previous interpretations and urban utopias increase our understanding of what is possible? How can cities’ capacity to prevent and increase resiliency to crises be improved?
Submit session proposal by January 14th
We invite everyone who has a wide-ranging interest in urban sustainability to participate in the Urban Studies Conference in Tampere. We aim to organize a live event, but we will follow the corona situation carefully. The deadline for the session proposals is on January 14, 2022. We encourage proposals that strengthen interdisciplinary discussion. Each proposal should include a title of the session, name(s) of presenter(s), email address(es), and affiliation(s), as well as a description of the content and aims of the session (max. 3,500 characters). Please send your proposal by email to kaupunkitutkimuksenpaivat2022@tuni.fi.
As part of the conference program, a pre-conference excursion to Hiedanranta area (https://hiedanranta.fi/en/) will be organized on April 27, 2022. The official hashtag for the Urban Studies Conference is #ktp2022Tampere.
Find more information on the website of Urban Studies Conference