As we are writing this short introduction, it is exactly a year ago since we had to cancel our planned Training School, which was supposed to take place in late March 2020 in Tallinn, Estonia. 
It was the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and we had no idea that the situation would remain critical for such a long time. 
Now, a year later, we have adapted to the situation by organizing our Working Groups' Meetings online, and by starting what soon became a series of live webinars, each time hosted by one working group yet bringing together discussions across the entire network. The first two webinars, “Meaningfulness, Appropriation and Integration in/of City Narratives” on November 17th, and “Fieldwork within the Network” on Jan 29th, have been - despite the limitations of the online format - engaging diverse modes and moments of presentation, discussion and exchange. Both events have resulted in a booklet containing the contributions by the participants, shared through our website. The next webinar “Reading, Writing and Activating Urban Places, hosted by WG3, will take place on April 7th, and WG1 will host the fourth webinar on May 12. The YouTube channel recently created is also an alternative mode of participation and future record of these events.
In the meantime, two journal issues are in preparation, and the Vademecum that we published last year on the initiative of WG2 has already received some external reviews. The website offers regular updates about publications by our members, while the team page now allows us to actually see the many different members of the network, the academic backgrounds, short biographies, and research interests of a team that keeps on growing.
Still, some crucial aspects of our network on Writing Urban Places are duly lacking: how to speak and write about places if we are unable to visit them, and how to establish moments of exchange if these moments cannot be in person, and in-situ? The Training school we postponed last year is still waiting to be held, the call for Short Time Scientific Missions is on hold, as is the Mid-term conference, we had been planning to have in Porto last November. With the gradual reopening of the world, we hope to move towards real meetings again, in person and in place, to start with our Training School in Tallinn and the Mid-Term Conference and MC meeting in Porto soon after. 

Repository of Methods

Related to the above-mentioned online seminar, Working group 3 (Methodological Framework) has continued developing an extensive collection of methods for reading, writing and acting on urban places. You can visit the repository here, and check the guidelines for contributing your own methods here.

Book: La Puissance Projective: Intrigue Narrative et Projet Urbain

By Pieter Uyttenhove, Bart Keunen, Lieven Ameel: La puissance projective: Intrigue narrative et projet urbain. Geneve: MetisPresses, 2021). With the collaboration of Johanna Godefroid, Noemi Loeman, Hendrik Sturm, Sofie Verraest & Tom Ysewijn.

The book examines the narrative properties of urban planning, drawing on a wide range of examples, from post-I-World War Ypres to Disneyland Paris. Throughout, it connects well-established narrative theories of plot structure and narrative rhetorics with in-depth analysis of particular planning cases.

For more information click here.

“Fieldwork Within Network” recordings on our YouTube channel

For those of you who were not able to join our recent webinar Fieldwork Within Network, organized by WG4, 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 Fieldwork.

IN THE MEDIA
 

Review: Vademecum – Journal of European Landscapes

Marilena Mela has reviewed Vademecum: 77 Minor Terms for Writing Urban Places (2020, eds. Klaske Havik, Kris Pint, Svava Riesto and Henriette Steiner) for the Journal of European Landscapes.

From her abstract:

“The book is the product of an interdisciplinary collaboration of 38 authors and consists of a collection of terms that offer alternative understandings of urban space and places. In the review, I discuss the topic, structure, and relevance of the book, I suggest different ways of reading it, and I connect it with related genealogies in cultural and spatial studies. Overall, the wide geographical and disciplinary spectrum of Vademecum makes it a good read for anyone engaged with the complex object of landscape.“

Working Group 3 has completed the editing process of the forthcoming Writingplace Journal # 5, devoted to “Narrative Methods for Writing Urban Places”, and is presently proofreading the entire issue, which should be out very soon. In the meantime, departing from the over sixty entries submitted to our Padlet app with methods and ideas to analyze, experience, capture, and narrate the city, we assembled the programme for the webinar “Reading, Writing and Activating Urban Places: Methods and Assignments”. This conference, which will be held on-line as the previous two, will take place next Wednesday, the 7^th of April 2021, and seeks to overview and discuss a heterogeneous array of methods, including experimental, uncanonical and hybrid approaches. Assembling thirty presentations in a short 7-minutes-long Pecha-Kucha-like format, the webinar will constitute an essential moment of discussion from a methodological point of view. It will also be an exciting step towards the “Repository of Methods” the Working Group has been working on, and part of the preparation for the mid-term conference now postponed to October, given the current pandemic situation.