After more than a year of restrictions and uncertainty, this newsletter is a positive, promising one. 
In the past year, we have found ways to work around the complicated conditions that prevented us from organising the intended in-person and in-loco meetings. However, what started as a “Plan B” developed into a highly productive and engaging series of webinars. These four webinars, each hosted by one of the Working Groups, have allowed us to further discuss and define the key themes of the action, from theoretical, practical, methodological and communicative perspectives. In the following months, we will finalise the reports of these webinars and make them available to all members of the network, as they are already shared in video to all interested. 
In terms of research and dissemination, we have a number of projects nearing completion. The Vademecum: 77 Minor Terms for Writing Urban Places has now appeared in a printed version as a beautiful small book, ready to be carried around as it was originally conceived. All contributors will receive their own copy very soon. Meanwhile, the journal issue Writingplace #5 Narrative Methods for Writing Urban Places, edited by WG3, is in its final phase of production and will be released this month, while the next issue, Meaningfulness, Appropriation and Integration in/of City Narratives is in progress too.
Meanwhile, several calls are open: we kindly invite action members to consider submitting a paper to the special issue “Cognition of and Interaction with Urban Environments through Narratives” of the European Journal of Investigation in Health, Psychology and Education; to participate in the translation project Other Destinations, or to join the Training School Local Stories in Tallinn, Estonia, on September 15-17.
Meanwhile, we are preparing for the Mid-Term Conference and MC meeting in Porto, 26-27 October 2021, as a moment to look back to our first two years, and to look forward to our ambitions for the near future. Here,  theory, methodology, fieldwork and communication will come together and lead to further paths for Writing Urban Places.

“Integration Through Discourse” recordings on our YouTube channel

For those of you who were not able to join our recent webinar Integration Through Discourse, organized by WG1, or who joined and would still like to review the event’s discussions, the recordings of the introduction, and the three thematic sessions (Mapping, Performing, Sharing) are now available in our YouTube channel, under the playlist Communication.

Working Group 3 organized the webinar “Reading, Writing and Activating Urban Places: Methods and Assignments”, on the 7th of April 2021. This online conference brought together participants from all Working Groups to present and discuss an array of methods and assignments to learn about, explore, understand, document, experience, and activate different urban places. Following a Pecha-Kucha-like format, the interdisciplinary group of 30 presenters revealed a great variety of approaches, some very experimental and uncanonical, setting the direction of the future steps of WG3 in the subsequent phases of the Action. Recordings of this event are available on our YouTube channel and, as an outcome of the mini-conference, WG3 is presently compiling the different contributions in a PDF booklet. In the following months, the group will proceed with the work of editing and selecting the “Repository of Methods” entries, but also calls the members from all Working Groups to contribute with further entries to our (fast and wild) digital platform. This work will be presented and discussed at the Mid-Term Conference in Porto, in late October, with the exciting possibility of putting some of these methods to test.

During the spring period of 2021, Working group 4 (WG4) was completing the tasks and initiatives that were part of the second grand period activities. Although as a result of the newly emerged constraints dictated by the Covid 19 pandemic this period took an immensely different path from the originally planned one, the WG4 concur with the newly emerged initiatives of the WUP network and successfully organize an online webinar at the end of January. The period after the webinar was used to prepare the digital publication which was successfully completed by the mid of May. The publication encompasses the material that was presented at the webinar and includes texts explaining the presented projects of various fieldwork initiatives, critical comments regarding the presented material as well as a rich visual representation of each of the projects.   

In the following months, during the summer period, the WG4 activities will be focused on achieving two things. First, to obtain the preliminary framework in which the fieldwork activities of the WUP network will take place in the third grand period (respectively during 2022), and second to define the most productive way to present publicly the ‘pool of projects’ that were previously collected. Both initiatives are expected to take place during the Porto mid-term conference planned for the second half of October 2021.