III International symposium “Rebuilding a Place to Call Home: the Future of Spatial Planning in Ukraine”

Spatial planning often claims to be able to solve the most complex challenges of growth, both enabling and directing it. However, such ambitions are overshadowed by failures in implementation, low political interest and institutional conflicts on the ground across the world. Situations of open conflict and war accentuate these challenges as in the case of the 2022 Russian war on Ukraine which has brought immense destruction, destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, and seen dozens of cities razed to the ground.

As Ukraine and its partners aim to launch ambitious rebuilding programs, the input and the role of spatial planning and urban development professionals and scholars is not yet clear. Key questions include: are more evidence and knowledge production for policy or a better institutionalization of spatial planning within the recovery process necessary? What focus does planning education need to adopt, considering the great variation of challenges in regions and the diverse expectations of the planner’s role? Is there space for new discourses and the establishment of normative planning expectations of the built environment in the context of reconstruction?

The symposium aims to bring together academic knowledge with local expertise and practitioners’ needs. The theme of this year’s seminar is the response to the mounting challenges of recovery in three key areas:

1. policy design and governance for resilience,
2. learning from policy transfer,
3. education and knowledge in spatial planning.

We invite you to contribute to the symposium.

More information about the topics and deadlines is available here.

Contributions to the symposium will considered for publication in a special issue of AESOP Transactions journal.

The symposium is organized jointly by the Centre for Land and Housing Research (Kharkiv School of Architecture) and the Department of Built Environment (Aalto University)

Contact:

Oleksandr Anisimov, Doctoral researcher at the Department of Built Environment (Aalto University).

E-mail: [email protected]