
Six seed grants were awarded to IUR researchers
The aim of the seed grants is to foster research cooperation amongst IUR members together with urban researchers outside the IUR.
This year, six projects were awarded:
Employing Theory of Change in Research for Societal Transformation
Per Hillbur, Sadiq Abubakar Gulma and Marwa Dabaieh will organize a symposium on “Employing Theory of Change in Research for Societal Transformation”. The aim of this research is to put focus on employing theory of change (TOC) for research in addressing an urban issue that will create a long-term change. It is used as a participatory concept that brings together different (interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and/or multisectoral) stakeholders to explore interests, power relations, values, social justice, sustainable development and intentions.
Researching Finance: A IUR Methodological Self-Training Course for urban scholars
Chiara Valli and Defne Kadioglu will organize three workshops with invited speakers that deal with challenges around enhancing financial literacy among social scientists, geographers and planners. One of the biggest challenges is to show and formulate what financialized investments into the urban environment ‘do’ in the urban that is different than regular private investments without the necessary financial literacy.
Sustainability Conflicts in Waterfront Development Projects: A Study on Planners’ Perceptions
Elnaz Sarkheyli will do a pilot study that aims to examine the planners’ perceptions and roles in identifying and managing sustainability conflicts. Specifically, the research questions seek to understand how planners involved in such projects identify, perceive, and give weight to these conflicts and what strategies they take to manage them during the planning process.
Seminar on Energy Democracy and capacity-building community
The workshop organized by Ulrik Kohl and Patrick Jørgensen (University of Roskilde) will bring together community grassroots and researchers from Roskilde University and Malmö University. These actors may share a common cause which is the commitment to a decentralized and participatory renewable energy transition. However, they may take different roles and attitudes when it comes to implementing concrete applications of energy commons, understood as community-controlled flows of heat and power. This is the conflictual space that the project intends to unpack.
Older women in the city
Carina Listerborn, Elena Vacchelli (University of Greenwich, UK) and Anindita Datta (University of Delhi, India) will hold a meeting in Malmö to enhance the process of writing several research proposals that integrates intersectional perspectives on urban life from the experiences of older women in the UK, India and Sweden.
Connect4
Marwa Dabaieh, Per Hillbur, Sadiq Abubakar Gulma, Deena ElMahdy (British University in Egypt) and Dalya Maguid (British University in Egypt) will set up a trial to connect the challenges of segregation, inequality, post conflict re-building and the climate crisis in a game-based approach. The idea is finding common possible solutions that can have impact on the 4 challenges while engaging local community in the problem solving in tackling such wicked problems of our modern times. How we can utilise social and environmental innovation together with digital fabrication to connect the puzzle pieces of those four mentioned problems to design and build four surfaces of a bus shed (roof and three wall) in a participatory manner. The design will be achieved through a design competition and the selected proposal will be implemented in Lund urban living lab in an experimental