Blog

Hub members Jieling Liu (ed.), Luisa Schmidt (ed.) and Olivia Bina have contributed to a new report on Addressing the Nexus Challenge of Climate Change, Human Health and Urban Sustainability. The study, published on ICS-ULisboa’s series Estudos e Relatórios and available here, summarises the core discussion points and essential outcomes of an Expert Meeting, which took place at the Portuguese Academy of Sciences during 19-20 September 2018.

The Lisbon Expert Meeting was an in-depth inquiry of 15 internationally-known scientists and policy experts on the complex interconnection of uncertain climate change impacts, urban health, and well-being problems and sustainable development, as well as on adaptation strategies and challenges. The meeting report contains three parts: 1) general framing of contexts, 2) review of climate change-health policies, and 3) systems sciences unraveling the nexus between climate change and health, and proposed  science policy pathways.

The international seminar (Re)Scaling Networks in Portugal and Europe: Towards New Forms of Decision-Making? will take place at ICS-ULisboa on November 11, 2019.

This international seminar, co-organised by UTH member Roberto Falanga, will gather local and international networks to discuss their role in Europe. How can local claims get more emphasis and be more effectively heard? How can old and new forms of networking re-scale decision-making?

To answer these questions, scholars, practitioners, decision-makers, as well as associated and non-associated members of civil society are free to join and contribute to the debate.

The seminar is part of “Reclaim Europe!”, a project that the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Portugal develops with multiple local and international partners.

Registration: http://bit.ly/rescaling

New blog post by Olivia Bina and colleagues, introducing research arising from the INTREPID Cost Action.

Urban research, the focus of UTH, is almost by definition both inter and transdisciplinary – this blog post reflects on the skills and dispositions needed, as well as the far reaching career implications of such research.

If disciplines shape scientific research by forming the primary institutional and cognitive units in academia, how do researchers start being interested in and working with a transdisciplinary approach? How does this influence their career development?

INTREPID is a recently concluded Cost Action, a 32 country network, led by Olivia Bina, with the overall aim to better understand how to achieve more efficient and effective interdisciplinary research in Europe, in order to enhance our capacity to meet contemporary global (urban) challenges characterised by increasing complexity and uncertainty.

INTREPID’s latest publication is now available online.

INTREPID Knowledge: Interdisciplinary & Transdisciplinary Research and Collaboration is a book that tells the story of INTREPID, and of the journey upon which the network embarked upon. In it, you will find a compendium of highlights from selected works carried out by INTREPID’s three working groups during their 4-year journey, as well as reflections on the experience from the perspective of the participants, and finally – some ideas for an ‘Intrepid future’.

project exPERts, based at the UTH, organises its final conference on October 29 and 30, in the Auditorium Sedas Nunes of ICS-ULisboa.

On the 29th (starting at 16.45) the research team will present the results of the project.

Day 30th will be opened (at 14.30) by a roundtable on the “state of housing” in Portugal – with “State of housing [O estado da habitação]” being the title of a dossier edited by Marco Allegra and Simone Tulumello and recently published on the journal Cidades: Comunidades e Territórios. With the moderation of Luisa Pinto (Público), confirmed speakers are Helena Roseta (MP for Partido Socialista), Ana Silva Fernandes (University of Porto) and Rita Silva (association Habita).

Following the roundtable (at 17.00) the closing event, an AESOP Lecture:

• Manuel Aalbers (University of Leuven): The Financialization of the City;
• Iván Tosics (Metropolitan Research Institute): Planning for efficient and inclusive housing.

exPERts is a research project which investigates the role of experts in public policies: through its research on the Programa Especial de Realojamento (Special Rehousing Program, PER), exPERts wants to understand how policy paradigms, practices and techniques are adopted in (and adapted to) specific contexts and policy sectors, and how policy experts make a strategic use their professional knowledge and status to steer the policy process.

The exPERts research team is led by Marco Allegra (principal investigator, ICS-ULisboa). exPERts is a partnership between ICS-ULisboa, IGOT-ULisboa, and CIES-IUL; it is funded by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) with a grant of  €165,000 (ref: PTDC/ATP-EUR/4309/2014) for 36 months. exPERts started in June 2016.

The 10th Annual Small Cinemas Conference, co-organised by UTH members Mariana Liz and Pedro Neto, will take place at ICS-ULisboa in Lisbon, Portugal, between 25 and 27 September 2019. Tamara Falicov (Kansas, USA) and Philippe Meers (Antwerp, Belgium) are the confirmed keynote speakers.

‘Small Cinemas, Small Spaces’ aims to discuss matters of space in the cinemas of small nations, with regards to representation, the materiality and marketing of film locations, and production, viewing and exhibition practices in peripheral film cultures. The event brings together scholars exploring notions of space and scale in film, by considering what can be the small spaces of cinema, from early cinematic attractions to the recent dissemination of individual screens and broadcasting digital platforms.

For further information about the conference, please check the conference’s webpage.

The programme is available here. Any questions, please write to the organisers (Mariana Liz, Inês Ponte, Filipa Rosárioand Pedro Figueiredo Neto).

Three researchers from UTH (together with João Seixas, UNL) speak to journalist  Eduarda Maio  about ‘Urban Futures’: Olivia Bina,  Roberto Falanga, Marco Allegra.

Here you can find the podcast (Portuguese only, sorry): episode 110 of the program Ponto de Partida, broadcasted by Antena1-RTP  (Portuguese national radio).

Antena 1 contacted us after the 2019 edition of ICS-ULisboa’s annual conference What Urban Futures? From Crisis to Hope – check the program, and the videos from our live streaming of the event.

The ICS-ULisboa conference 2019 What Urban Futures? From Crisis to Hope, organised by the Urban Transitions Hub in cooperation with H2020 Project ROCK is now over (full program available here). After two days of movie screenings and debate the main conference sessions took place on June 5 and June 6. The two days were respectively dedicated to the role of technology in shaping urban futures, and to the politics/rights nexus in an age of climate change.

The two sessions are now available for streaming on the Youtube channel of ICS-ULisboa.

In preparation of the ICS conference 2019 What Urban Futures? From Crisis to Hope organised by the Urban Transitions Hub in collaboration with H2020 project ROCK, Mariana Liz has published two blog posts as introductions to the movie screening sessions. The first session, on June 3 and introduced by Graça Castanheira, is dedicated to nature and technology; the second session, on June 4 and introduced by João Seixas is dedicated to the transformation of Lisbon.

Both session will take place at Centro Académico do Caleidoscópio, a multi-purpose space of the University of Lisbon, and start at 18.00.