Aesop annual congress
Venice, Italy
09-13 / 07 / 2019
AESOP’s (Association of European Schools of Planning) was founded in 1987. The AESOP network has served as an excellent information and communication base for all the European basic and research projects in the European Union, which were initiated in the last two decades by the European Commission, by ESPON, European foundations and national governments. Two established and widely read European planning journals, European Planning Studies and disP: The Planning Review are linked to AESOP, serving a Europe wide readership with up-to-date planning research. Today, 2012, 25 years after the Kappenberg meeting, AESOP is an established association, with 162 institutional members in 38 countries.
It has been worthwhile for all, who shared the vision of a European network of planning schools to invest time and efforts in establishing the association. Source: History - AESOP (aesop-planning.eu)
The darker sides of smart city development
Co-chairs Alessandro Balducci (Politecnico di Milano – Italy)
Klaus Kunzmann (TU Dortmund – Germany)
In the “urban age” a smart city is an extended city which using technologies is able to reinforce advantages and to cope with disadvantages linked to massive concentration and to the increasingly rapid pace of change. The diffusion of smart devices has transformed citizens not just into clients that may enjoy the improvements (eg. from public transport to prevent congestion in streets) but also has transformed citizens into sensors, providers of the information that feed the system. All the actors from companies to governments claim that the citizens must be “at the center” of their interpretation of city’s smartness, but is it true? Smart technologies may allow the highest top-down concentration of command and control in the hands of those (public and private) that govern the platforms and receive data produced by sensors and, at the same time, a good opportunity for bottom-up and sharing initiatives.
The special session wants to invite participants to analyse the darker side of smart city in order to understand how planning can work to enlarge rather than to reduce the citizen’s power.
For Full published paper: Aesop – 2019
Shahin, A. (2019, July). Digital participatory planning tools helpful side and side effects. In International Congress Planning for Transition Proceedings. AESOP Annual Congress in Venice, Italy. Retrieved from https://www.aesop2019.eu/program/#1562081402042-a5ba0b31-2b1a