In October 2019, the urbanHIST project (EC-H2020-MSCA) started the fourth year if its implementation. During this month, two international events took place on all-consortium level in Stockholm – the second scientific urbanHIST conference “Interpreting 20th Century European Urbanism” (21 – 23 October 2019) and Network-Wide Workshop Week VI (NWWW VI, 24 – 26 October 2019). Both events were visited by urbanHIST teams from beneficiary universities, including UPJŠ in Košice, partner organisations of the project as well as external international audience and guests.
The second urbanHIST conference took place in Wenner-Gren Center in Stockholm during 21 – 23 October 2019. All four beneficiary universities participated in organising the conference. The conference programme consisted of 4 keynote lectures, 3 discussion panels, 13 thematic tracks, and social and networking activities. Dedicated to the main theme “Interpreting 20th Century European Urbanism”, the thematic focus of the conference relied heavily on the commitment of the urbanHIST Early Stage Researchers, who also presented their partial research results. All thematic tracks were proposed by urbanHIST doctoral students, who were also co-chairing individual thematic sessions having a senior researcher aside.
The keynote speakers were prof. Dr. Ing. arch. Henrieta Moravčíková from the Institute of History, Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and the Faculty of Architecture of Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, prof. RNDr. Luděk Sýkora, Ph.D. from Charles University in Prague, prof. Sasha Tsenkova from University of Calgary and Prof. Stephen V. Ward from Oxford Brookes University. Their selection displayed the conference and programme research interest. The discussion panels and roundtables marked the link between the urbanHIST leitmotif and the venue of the conference. Two of them thematised the neglected planning histories in the European periphery and argued the diversity of different research traditions regarding the history of the city and its planning. The third discussion panel chaired and organised by urbanHIST partner organisations ArkDes (The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design) and Boverket (Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning) addressed gaps in sustainable urban development research in the Swedish planning discourse. Within the thematic tracks, almost 60 contributions of participants from four continents were presented, which demonstrates the international interest in the programme and its research fields.
The conference was followed by urbanHIST Network-Wide Workshop Week VI which took place in Hilton Hotel Slussen in Stockholm during 24 – 26 October 2019. NWWW VI comprised a number of regular consortium activities, such as ESRs meetings, management and Supervisory Board meetings. As usual, supervision meetings were held to discuss progress of doctoral students and set up further research steps. The main part of the NWWW VI consisted of training workshops dealing with the issues of application training, career options and thesis defence (led by Local Directors of the project), and a lecture on housing policy of European Union presented by Jan-Evert Nilsson from Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona. Finally, social events for urbanHIST participants made the stay in Stockholm even more engaging. The next workshop week of the consortium will take place in February 2020 in Valladolid, Spain.
Katarína Hajduková, Ondřej Jirásek
Faculty of Arts, UPJŠ in Košice
For more detailed information on urbanHIST past and on-going, all-consortium and local events, please visit www.urbanhist.eu.
Foto: Ebba Högstöm, Katarína Hajduková
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 721933. |
