It’s the Spring teaching term, which means Carla has been busy with curriculum development, teaching and assessment. Regardless, Carla has managed to participate in two Data Stories relevant events, collecting a quirky pair of BeNeLux designed conference socks and a dinner in a charming fondue chalet overlooking the Zurich mountains!
Land-Use Planning in the Digital Age: Processes, Impacts and Opportunities
On 5-6 February, Carla was invited to attend the workshop, Land-Use Planning in the Digital Age: Processes, Impacts and Opportunities. The workshop was hosted by the SILAR and DISCLOSE project teams, both headed by Principal Investigator Prof. h.c. Dr. Anna Hersperger and held in the Swiss Federal Research Institute (WSL).
Held over two days, the workshop included a series of presentations by the project team and by invited speakers representing both academia and the planning practice. Two central questions the project team were investigating were: 1) How does digitalisation reshape processes and practices? And 2) What are the promises and pitfalls of digitalisation in land-use planning? Both of these questions were underpinned by concerns around how research findings could make an impact for practice.
What made this workshop stand out was its focus on methods to extract high level insights from all the participants. In addition to the standard format of speaker presentation followed by Q&A, Hersperger’s team incorporated activities such as short free writing sessions to stimulate discussion, round table discussions based on specific prompts, group work to determine gaps in our knowledge and fixed research questions for future research agendas. For example, the two central questions from above were whiteboarded in small groups. Each group considered answers to the questions and provided suggestions on theoretical gaps that remain unexplored and unanswered. Or for another example, the team created placemats for use during the lunch break and these mats had provocative comments such as:
“Land-use planning in the digital age means modelling the future with GIS, big data, and algorithms—only to be surprised that humans still don’t behave like the model.”
“Digital land-use planning: when the algorithm knows where everything should go, but not why no one wants it there.”
Another stand out was the deliberate attempt to bring together researchers and practitioners from varying European countries. These types of workshops demonstrate how the academy has expanded in its effort to interject research into practice. Importantly, the work showcased demonstrated the innovative work happening in the WSL on the digitalisation of planning and the ongoing efforts to theorise how digitalisation is concretely impacting the planning profession. Many questions were raised and left unanswered—and indicator of the challenges the planning profession will grapple with in the transition to full digitalisation.
Ultimately, the project team aims to co-produce a co-authored essay based on the workshop with all the involved participants; a large feat but a further example of how the project team worked to think outside the box and to create an outstanding, though provoking conference.
BeNeLux Conference
From 8 – 10 April, Carla attended the inaugural BeNeLux conference, held at KU Leuven’s campus in Belgium. Welcoming the audience on the first day, Ate Poorthuis explained that the origin story of BeNeLux is rooted in the desire for regional colleagues to network with each other without having to travel long distances or fly. This first inaugural conference drew over 530 registered participants, representing 27 countries and over 200 institutions. For Ireland, we had three nameless and unfindable registered participants, including Carla!
The programme for the conference included 90 parallel sessions, 400 presentations and, based on the many sessions attended, a healthy representation of Geography’s many sub-disciplines. Erik Swyngedouw, issuing the inaugural keynote address, provided a sweeping history of human geography, in a presentation aptly titled, Meandering Across Time and Space: A Geographical Expedition Through a Reactionary Discipline. What Swyngedouw covered was profound and too challenging to summarise in this blog post, but in his response to the prompt on the role of Geography in the past, present and future, Swyngedouw pointedly called out the need to break from intellectual dishonesty, to recognise that we are the architects of populist discourse and that we need to name key mechanisms of struggle and speak truth to them. Importantly, he claimed, we need to specify our geographical desire and mobilise our intellect towards it, speaking truth to power in the process.
Our Commodity Narrative’s paper, Playing the Housing Market: Creatively exploring housing commodification through a gamified spoof property website was scheduled for the second day of the conference. It was one of five papers the session co-organised by Bettina Van Hoven and Julia Munuera Garcia from University of Groningen in a special session titled Gamefying Geography: Play, Participation, and Pedagogy in the Geographical Curriculum. Though the session was designed to focus on the role of games to teach concepts in Geography, our Commodity Narratives work appealed to the organisers because of their long-standing interests in the use of arts-based methods and creative approaches to research.
The greatest benefit of presenting the work were the questions from the audience that forced deep reflection on the Unreal Homes spoof property website we have produced: How does one win? What is the role of fun? What type of affective responses are you seeking from the users? These questions are critical to learn how to best define and describe our process on this case study, and to consider our individual and collective aims and objectives as we reach the final stages of finalising our satirical website Unreal Homes. Presenting the work and fielding questions has already led to provocative discussions amongst the team members. It was also rewarding to see Unreal Homes gleefully received from the conference attendees (one even remarked that the mortgage calculator was genius) and that even without access to the site to play it, the presentation of the satirical content and games alone elicited laughs from the audience.
