3rd European Urban Summer School

Globalisation, climate change, resource depletion and financial crises are the prevailing – and often crippling – conditions which shape our immediate professional and academic lives and longer-term futures. In our times of rapid change, young planners, architects and designers must develop and adopt new and more holistic approaches to planning and design in order to engage in a meaningful manner with an increasingly urban world and to propose creative interventions that go beyond the immediately physical.

The 3rd European Urban Summer School (EUSS) is a joint project of AESOP / ECTP-CEU / IFHP / ISOCARP and SCIBE, hosted by the SCIBE team at the University of Westminster, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, from 21 to 30 September 2012 (http://www.scibe.eu/category/euss/). It aims to bring together postgraduate students, emerging and experienced academics and young and established design and planning professionals from all over Europe (and further away) to develop a better understanding of some of the most pressing contemporary issues related to the built environment and to amplify and strengthen the links between planning- and design-relevant research and professional practice.

This year's EUSS is an invitation – a call to arms – to engage in the quest for and development of new ways of thinking about and new tools in response to emerging issues of scarcity – a condition generally defined by the insufficiency of cultural, social or economic resources. But scarcity is about more than simple resource depletion:  it is embedded in political, social and ecological systems. How and by whom is scarcity generated, engineered, constructed and perceived? What are we, as practitioners in an urban context, to do under conditions of scarcity in the built environment? The EUSS is an invitation to reclaim the possibility of making the city in our times of scarcity.

Potential participants and tutors are encouraged to apply via email as early as possible in order to be considered (see http://www.scibe.eu/category/euss/ for details on the application process for participants and tutors). The application deadline is 31 May 2012. The EUSS 2012 Joint Committee (Deljana Iossifova and Jeremy Till (University of Westminster), Maros Finka (AESOP), Dominique Lancrenon (ECTP-CEU), Piotr Lorens (ISOCARP), Derek Martin (IFHP) and Izabela Mironowicz (AESOP)) will select up to 60 Young Planning Professionals and the most suitable tutors.

Please refer to the website for all relevant information!