The INDIGO Project

5th International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity
2016-08-30 - 2016-09-03
Budapest will host the 5th International Degrowth Conference at Corvinus University (30 August – 3 September 2016). The conference will link the most visible degrowth thinkers of today with academic and participatory audiences in Hungary and the wider region. At the same time Budapest will be the host of the first Degrowth Week, which will feature numerous degrowth activists, practitioners and policy-makers.
Degrowth is a movement which reminds us that infinite growth on a finite planet is neither sustainable nor desirable. Degrowth deconstructs the myth that growth is the central solution for the impasse our societies have led us to. The movement tries to understand the convergence of the crises we are experiencing and argues that they are interconnected. The Degrowth movement tries to construct serene and democratic pathways toward more social and environmental justice, well-being, meaningful livelihoods, emancipation, conviviality and autonomy.
Budapest will host the 5th International Degrowth Conference from the 30th of August to the 3rd of September 2016. After Paris in 2008, Barcelona in 2010, Venice in 2012 and Leipzig in 2014, the conference, which focuses on ecological sustainability and social equity, will be held in the Corvinus University of Budapest.
First and foremost, the conference is a meeting place of prominent academic researchers from across the globe. Every two years the gathering offers them a ground for discussing the latest developments in this new interdisciplinary field of research. They focus on issues related to the breaching of environmental limits and the failure of economic infrastructures to provide a dignified existence in society. The scientific community also interacts with practitioners during the conference in order to articulate viable alternatives to the current socio-economic models.
Within this conference, a space will also be designated for the wider public. Budapest will be the cradle of a new initiative, called the Degrowth Week, which will create a new platform for practical activities and workshops, partnership with local initiatives, participatory discussions and debates among a wide circle of stakeholders and cultural, artistic and creative programmes throughout the city. During the spring of 2016, the wider public will be invited to help the organisers curate the events of the Degrowth week.
Degrowth is not an entirely new issue in Hungary. The conference will highlight the work of the renowned Hungarian thinker Karl Polanyi and his seminal work “The Great Transformation”. Decades after the publication of this foundational piece, degrowth re-entered Hungary in 2011 with the Hungarian translation of Serge Latouche’s book “Farewell to Growth.” Since then degrowth has been fiercely debated in Hungary with the publication of several books, articles, along with the organisation of public discussions and participatory workshops. It is also influencing the development of practical local initiatives like Cyclonomia or Cargonomia.
Join us in Budapest.
The Budapest Degrowth Conference organisation team
http://budapest.degrowth.org/
contact@budapest-degrowth.org

Annual International Conference 2016 - Panel: Rethinking the Commons (and perhaps also gentrification)
2016-08-30 - 2016-09-02
The panel seeks to address the categories of gentrification and commoning as two different, but not necessarily opposite attitudes toward the reconfiguration of neoliberal power in Europe and beyond. In doing so, we seek to discuss how post-capitalist imagination is seen to emerge from practices of self-organisation, DIY resistance or community based groups and collectives. We are interested in approaches engaging anti-austerity movements as agents of new political imagination, but which remain aware of the risks of co-option and de-politicisation promoted by neoliberal institutions and organisations on the ground, often associated with the phenomena of gentrification and neoliberal economies. The panel aims to discuss papers bringing together a geographical focus based on, but not limited to, the socio-historical configuration of power within the context of European urban peripheries as well as the peripheries of Europe. With this we include both the margins of European cities as well as the margins of Europe itself, aiming to promote forms of comparative connections between North and South, East and West. We are particularly interested in how, in different European contexts, institutional politics and social movements redefined the struggle against neoliberal austerity politics.
We accept papers on (but not limited to):
– Responses to the austerity crisis in the peripheries of both Southern and Northern Europe
– Analysis of processes of gentrification in European cities
– Studies of processes of marginalisation in the European peripheries
– Limits and challenges of activists scholarship with urban social movements
– Ethnographies of neoliberal planning and architecture
– Case studies addressing spatialized practices of post-capitalism
– Practices of urban commoning with a focus on sharing, collaborative and solidarity networks in the European city.

Further details about the general conference at:
http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+International+Conference+2016.htm

2nd EMES - Polanyi International Seminar: Societies in transition – Social and solidarity economy, the commons, public action and livelihood
2016-05-19 - 2016-05-20
After the success of the 1st EMES-Polanyi International Seminar held in Paris in February 2012, EMES in collaboration with the European Institute of Political Economy Karl Polanyi and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, will organize the 2nd EMES-Polanyi International Seminar on 19th and 20th of May 2016.
After the focus on the economic crisis of the 1st Seminar, the main objective of this edition will be to contribute to the analysis of contemporary modalities of the relationship between economy and democracy.
The Seminar aims to achieve a complementarity among the following four thematic axes: ￼

Axis 1 – Social and solidarity economy, social enterprise, and associations
Axis 2 – Analyses of the commons
Axis 3 – Reconfigurations of public action
Axis 4 – Steps toward buen vivir

Overall if one aggregates the proposals of all authors cited, they recombine three analytical categories that neoliberalism seeks to eliminate: the teleological perspective, deliberation, and the diversity of economic principles.
(i) Ostrom mobilizes the teleological perspective of the common good by connecting it to a collective attempt to reach a problematization of ‘the common’ whereby goals are linked to the means used to achieve them. This perspective is reinforced by the use of public spaces and actions in Habermas and Dewey as well as by the reference to the diversity of economic principles in Polanyi and Mauss.
(ii) Habermas focuses on the criticism to the relevance of the aggregative paradigm of individual preferences and substitutes it with the paradigm of deliberation. Dewey shows that it is not simply a matter of forming opinions: deliberation can be mobilized in the very course of action of a given public.
(iii) As for Polanyi and Mauss, they oppose the reduction of the economy to the market, something which Habermas was not able to leave behind. They reject the conceptual anachronism of ‘catallactics’, that is to say, the spontaneous market order proposed by Hayek. Their search for economic democracy can in turn be based on democratic elements identified by Habermas and Dewey, as well as on the resistance to commodification that does not lapse into statism thanks to Ostrom.
This complementarity among the cited authors and others in their understanding of contemporary practices deserves further study with a view to clarifying both the obstacles encountered as well as and the progress that it allows.

Conference: Constructing the Commons
2016-03-03 - 2016-03-04
The term ‘commons’ today is widely and extensively discussed within different theoretical frames of reference. Historically it refers to natural resources that we, the people, have in common. Resources that are not one’s property and are available to all: air, water, earth. Today, the term is used in very different ways in economic, social, and political theory, as well as within the creative industries. The project ‘Constructing the Commons’, initiated by the chair of Methods and Analysis of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University of Technology at the occasion of the visiting professorship of Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of the Tokyo based architectural office Atelier Bow-Wow, investigates the commons from a tangible perspective, from an architectural point of view.
First, the commons are understood as a series of concrete architectural and urban figures, which can be found in the Western and non-Western city and represents an idea of commonality. Out of this perspective the term refers to notions of the public realm. However, whereas the public realm is often thought to address the public at large in exceptional locales and moments, the commons seem to engage with smaller communities, within ordinary places and times. As well in Western as in non-Western contexts these figures of commonality seem to be largely absent from the contemporary ways that the city is transformed and developed. In our time of rapid development and strong differences, there seems to be a need to rethink and redraw these architectural figures of commonality.
Second, the commons are looked upon from a procedural perspective, implying the rituals, pleasures and politics of co-operation that articulate an architectural project. Increasingly there is an idea that architectural projects are not single-authored ventures, but rather complex and layered processes that depend upon multiple agencies that establish a commonality. This commonality encompasses the shared effort of designers, advisers, constructors, and owners, but architectural projects are also the result of the commonalities of other stakeholders, like inhabitants, users and neighbours that negotiate forces into a new venture. In other words, architecture is a ‘common enterprise’, a public effort.
The ‘Constructing the Commons’ project thus reflects upon the contemporary practices of architecture and urban design by probing into the figure and project of the commons. As a final event of a series of different workshop, research seminars and educational projects, organized in cooperation with Atelier Bow-Wow, the conference ‘Constructing the Commons’ on March 3rd and 4th 2016 brings together different new perspectives. Renowned academics and designers will reflect upon the multiple challenges that the commons pose today to the fields of architecture and urbanism, but also to the domains of sociology, political sciences, and philosophy. The conference wants to enrich our understanding of the commons, as architectural figure and architectural project.

Global Public Goods, Global Commons and Democracy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
2016-02-22 - 2016-02-23
Both concepts of “global public goods” and “global commons” are increasingly being used, both as powerful rhetorical devices in the policy discourse of international organizations and the debates of civil society, and as analytical and normative frameworks in international legal scholarship, economics and political theory. What difference does it make to express and frame global challenges according to one concept or the other? What kind of international cooperation and governance schemes do these concepts imply? Which democratic qualities and shortcomings in global decision-making processes do they reveal? Adopting a comparative approach and an interdisciplinary perspective, this two-day conference, hosting Prof. Dr. Inge Kaul and Prof. Dr. Pierre Dardot as keynote speakers, aims to highlight the epistemic networks and legal and political underpinnings behind each discourse.

Call for abstracts PLPR 2016
2016-02-17 - 2016-02-19 | Universität Bern, Bern, Switzerland
Abstracts for the 2016 edition of the Planning, Law, and Property Right (PLPR) Conference can now be submitted online (until October 16, 2015). PLPR2016 will take place in Bern, Switzerland, on February 17-19, 2016. All abstracts will be reviewed through a double-blind review process. Proposed papers should speak to topics at the intersection of planning, law, and/or property rights (i.e., not addressing just a planning issue, legal issue, or property rights issue in isolation of the other key themes of the association).
Please visit the PLPR Conference website for details: www.plpr2016.unibe.ch
Important dates:

Abstract submission opens: September 1, 2015
Abstracts due: October 16, 2015)
Early registration begins: December 14, 2015
Conference: February 17-19, 2016

Voorstelling toekomstvisie Trage Wegen
2016-01-28 13:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Brussels)
Op 28 januari 2016 stelt Trage Wegen vzw haar toekomstvisie voor tijdens een uitwisselingsnamiddag in Antwerpen.
De uitwisselingsnamiddag volgt onbekende sporen, brengt nieuwdenkers rond de tafel en bundelt perspectieven. Plenaire verhalen worden gevolgd door interactieve sessies. De dag biedt een verrassend parcours met omwegen en zijsporen, inclusief de publicatie ‘Veel méér dan een weg’ én een nieuwjaarsdrink. Een belangrijk evenement voor liefhebbers van trage wegen, lokale beleidsmakers, ontwerpers, activisten en geëngageerde burgers.
Meer informatie is te vinden op: http://www.tragewegen.be/en/toekomstvisie

International seminar PLOUGHING UP THE LANDED COMMONS
2016-01-20 | Dep. Architectuur, KULeuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1, Heverlee, 3001, Belgium
It is our pleasure to invite you to the international seminar PLOUGHING UP THE LANDED COMMONS that takes place in the Department of Architecture in Leuven on the 20th of January 2016.
Through this seminar the research groups involved in the INDIGO project intend to launch a ‘call for intellectual support and confrontation’ to a larger group of experts. Its aim is to reinforce the theoretical and methodological foundations of the research project.
The practical ambition is to bring together and organise a dialogue between innovative perspectives on the Landed Commons and publish them in internationally cited publications.
REGISTRATION
Deadline for registration is December 23rd. Availability of places is limited.
For info and registration : loris.servillo@asro.kuleuven.be. For registration it is sufficient to send an Email with your full address and telephone number.
A fee of 30 euro/ seminar (to be paid at the venue) will give access to the seminar, coffee, lunch and to all documents produced for the seminar (papers and ppts). Students and INDIGO stakeholders have free access.
MORE INFORMATION

INDIGO_Programme Seminar Jan2016_15-01-2016

International seminar COMMUNITY-BASED LAND TENURE AND GOVERNANCE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH
2015-11-09 | Dep. Architectuur, KULeuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1, Heverlee, 3001, Belgium
It is our pleasure to invite you to the international seminar COMMUNITY-BASED LAND TENURE AND GOVERNANCE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH that takes place in Leuven on the 9th of November 2015.
This seminar is part of a series of two. Part two of this seminar, PLOUGHING UP THE LANDED COMMONS, will take place on the 20th of January 2016. Both programmes are attached.
Community-based land tenure governance is a central cog in the wheel of community development. Access to land, land tenure and security of tenure rights are essential to a decent life for people all over the world. In countries of the Global South, more than in those of the North, these rights are often under threat. Community-based land tenure governance have played an important role in increasing this security.
This seminar is conceived as a ‘structured intellectual exchange’ with a larger group of experts with first-hand experience of working on the landed commons in the Global South, with the explicit aim of learning from these experts to build new landed commons in the North. Fostering dialogue and spur critical intellectual exchange on innovative perspectives of the landed commons is the main ambition of this workshop.
REGISTRATION
Deadline for registration is October 18th. Availability of places is limited.
For info and registration : loris.servillo@asro.kuleuven.be. For registration it is sufficient to send an Email with your full address and telephone number.
A fee of 30 euro/ seminar (to be paid at the venue) will give access to the seminar, coffee, lunch and to all documents produced for the seminar (papers and ppts). Students and INDIGO stakeholders have free access.
MORE INFORMATION

INDIGO Programme Seminar LANDTENURESYSTEMS Nov2015
INDIGO Programme Seminar Jan2015

Landschapspark Zuidrand: opening tragewegenverbinding rond de Hoofse Hoek
2015-10-18 13:00 - 16:00
Trage Wegen vzw, een van de INDIGO stakeholders, in samenwerking met het Landschapspark Zuidrand, opent plechtig een nieuwe tragewegenverbinding tussen Lint en Hove op de Dag van de Trage Weg. De opening is een bekroning van 3 jaar aan samenwerking tussen de provincie, de gemeenten, de lokale eigenaars en grondgebruikers, en verschillende middenveldbewegingen, en geldt als een mijlpaal in het openstellen van de open ruimte in de Zuidrand.

Debat: Une ville co-construite par les citoyens et les pouvoirs publics? // Hoe bouwen burgers en overheid samen de stad?
2015-10-09 18:30 - 20:30 | Faculteit Architectuur KUL – Campus Sint-Lucas Brussel, Rue des Palais/Paleizenstraat 65-67, 1030 Schaerbeek/Schaarbeek, Belgium
La plaine des Loups, Lausanne : un écoquartier co-construit par la ville et les citoyens
L’Association écoquartier a réussi à convaincre la ville de Lausanne de développer le site « Plaines du Loup » (30 ha) selon les principes qu’ils proposaient et en partenariat avec eux. Régis Niederoest est co-président de l’association. En introduction au débat, il nous racontera l’histoire de cette collaboration entre ville et citoyens.
Josaphat, Bruxelles : 24 ha à co-construire ?
Nous avons invité Rudy Vervoort, Ministre-Président de la Région Bruxelloise, Pierre Muyle, Bourgmestre faisant fonction d’Evere, et Bernard Clerfayt, Bourgmestre de Schaerbeek afin de réfléchir avec nous sur la façon dont les citoyens peuvent-ils être impliqués dans la conception, le développement et la gestion d’un site ? Que peut apprendre Bruxelles de l’exemple de Lausanne ?

La Plaine des Loups, Lausanne: een duurzame wijk, samen ontwikkeld door stad en burgers
De vereniging Ecoquartier heeft de stad Lausanne overtuigd om de wijk “Plaines du Loup” (30ha) te ontwikkelen volgens een aantal door hen voorgestelde principes en in samenwerking met hen. Regis Niederoest is co-voorzitter van de vereniging en zal, als inleiding tot het debat, het verhaal doen van deze samenwerking tussen stad en burgers.
Josaphat, Brussel: 24 ha om samen te ontwikkelen?
We nodigden Rudy Vervoort, Minister President van het Brussels Gewest, Pierre Muyle, dienstdoend burgemeester van Evere, en Bernard Clerfayt, burgemeester van Schaarbeek, uit om met ons na te denken: Hoe kunnen nieuwe en oude bewoners en het middenveld betrokken worden bij het ontwerp, de ontwikkeling en het beheer van een wijk? Wat kan Brussel leren uit het voorbeeld van Lausanne?

PLPR conference, Bangalore, India
2015-09-01 - 2015-09-03 | National Law School at India University, Bengaluru, India
The 1st South Asia Regional PLPR (Planning, Law and Property Rights) conference is taking place from 1st to 3rd of September.
ou can download the program at: https://www.nls.ac.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=896:land-policies-in-south-asia&catid=2:new
Flyer
The conference is hosted by the National Law School at India University, Bengaluru.
