ISDRS Conference 2022
Marc Wolfram
Director at Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development / Chair of Spatial Development and Transformation, TU Dresden
The Stockholm conference will feature the traditional themes and tracks of previous ISDRS conferences with a special topic to serve as the main thread of discussion in both plenary and breakout sessions relating to Sustainable Development. 2022 this theme is Sustainability and courage: Culture, art and human rights.
1a. Theoretical Approaches
Track Chairs
Goals and Objectives of the Track
Sustainability sciences focus on developing responses to the grand societal challenges, recognizing complex interconnections between humans and nature on a finite planet. They link research and practice, local and global scales, past, present and futures, as well as disciplines across the social sciences, natural sciences, life sciences and applied sciences (Clark and Harley, 2020; Fang et al., 2018). Sustainability sciences are fundamentally inter- and transdisciplinary, engaging academic, practitioner, and community perspectives, and integrating diverse conceptual frameworks and theoretical perspectives.
In this track we invite participants for discussions and propositions to advance the theoretical basis of the sustainability sciences. We welcome contributions that draw on descriptive, normative or prescriptive approaches to inform the development of theory, bringing together different knowledge to address sustainability challenges. Methodological reflections or propositions for new methods and tools as well as lateral thinking are also invited.
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6a. Urban and regional transformations
Track Chairs
Goals and Objectives of the Track
Cities and regions are of critical importance to move societies from a state of perpetual and aggravating social-ecological crises towards sustainability. The current pandemic has contributed to further accentuate their role as spatial subjects and arenas of change to achieve a wide range of interconnected transformations e.g. in terms of land use, biodiversity, water, energy, mobility, food, built environment, health, education or digitalization, among others. Deeply entrenched systemic configurations causing multiple sustainability and justice deficits have become widely visible, illustrating the urgency of, but also resistances to faster and disruptive societal innovation.?
Urban and regional transformations are thus about such deep, path-deviant changes simultaneously affecting?ecological, technological, institutional, cultural and practice dimensions?within or across diverse action and knowledge domains. Research in this field has been particularly interested in unpacking how complex?dynamics of place?as well as?relations across territories, scales and networks?play out in acknowledging, questioning and ultimately reshaping current patterns of inertia or “lock-in”, connecting the above dimensions in and through spatial relations, and from the individual to collective levels.
This track aims to bring together contributions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and global contexts to juxtapose and advance current understandings of urban and regional transformations. Authors may draw on conceptual and methodological developments or empirical studies (comparative and longitudinal ones are especially welcome). Research concerning the drivers and opportunities, the resistances and obstacles, as well as the patterns, processes and dynamics of such transformations is particularly relevant.
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6b. Urban and Regional Resilience
1.1?????Track Chairs
1.2?????Goals and Objectives of the Track
This track focuses on advancing our knowledge of what makes communities, cities, and regions more resilient in the face of accelerating and interconnected shocks and stresses, from the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change. The concept of resilience is closely related to sustainability and integral to the Sustainable Development Goals, but it is not limited to environmental challenges. Resilience represents an interdisciplinary, holistic, and proactive approach for tackling interconnected and complex problems that cut across the urban-rural divide. The Resilience Alliance defines social-ecological resilience as a system’s ability to withstand change and still maintain the same functions and structures, to self-organize, and to learn and adapt. It is necessary to seek a balance between resilience as an attempt to maintain the status quo and transformative resilience, which seeks to avoid collapse through change. This regular and rhythmic dance between chaos and order, between stability and transformation is fundamental to complex adaptive systems.
Similarly, urban and regional resilience is not just the ability to withstand or bounce back from crises, but to proactively transform unsustainable and unjust systems and behaviors. It encompasses different actors, sectors, and systems across spatial and temporal scales. Human health and wellbeing must be at the heart of any effort to build urban or regional resilience, but balancing human demands with the resilience of the more-than-human opens the door to alternative perspectives on what constitutes resilient ‘outcomes’ and over what timeframe(s). This further complicates debates on the resilience of urban and regional systems and highlights the importance of interspecies and intergenerational justice. Today, COVID19 is changing the way we perceive urban spaces, how we live them, and thus the relationship between urban centers and surrounding regions. It is increasingly clear that urban resilience is not only an issue that concerns cities, but also entire regions.
The aim of the sessions in this track is to bring together the latest insights on what urban and regional resilience means in today’s world in crisis. We also aim to identify innovations that are enhancing communities’ resilience (broadly defined) in different urban areas or regions.
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