Dear members of the Writing Urban Places Action, 

As we write this newsletter, we enter the final year of our COST Action Writing Urban Places. In the past few years, we have been able to establish and expand this dynamic and diverse network, which brought people from various disciplinary and geographical backgrounds together - physically, in our meetings and training schools in different European cities, and virtually, in webinars and zoom meetings, email correspondences, website posts and padlets. Our meetings gradually moved from a focus on working groups, to cross-working group workshops. Since September 2021, when after covid-19 restrictions were gradually lifted and in-person meetings became possible again, we have met in Tallinn, Porto, Osijek, Tampere, Canakkale and Skopje, for fieldwork events and training schools.
 
This newsletter - and the Open Meeting following on Oct 19^th -  will present short reports on the most recent events, in Canakkale and Skopje. Meanwhile, many publication initiatives have been realized and are still in progress. This fall we expect the launch of three new publications: the Repository of Methods, the Writingplace#7 journal issue on fieldwork, and a book presenting the results of the workshop in Canakkale. Meanwhile, the coming period holds promises for our Other Destinations translation project and an issue of NALANS.
 
Our great ambition for the coming year is to publish a Writing Urban Places book, reflecting on the work that has been done, its relevance for ‘new narratives for the European city and enduring evidence for future research and projects. The book will contain work by all four working groups and will present, as case studies, the mid-size European cities where we have held our meetings, training school and fieldwork activities. Further, the plans for this coming final year include a fieldwork event / training school in Tirana, Albania, and the last event in Delft, Netherlands, where all outcomes will be presented.

From the Action Chairs, 
Susana Oliveira & Klaske Havik

Open Meeting #2

On the 29th of June, Working Group 1 organized and hosted online the seasonal Open Meeting to discuss the news, events, and calls included in our 8th Newsletter. This new space of open conversations and collaborations responds to our engagement to continue improving communication among ourselves.

 

Narrating Hiedanranta:
Stories of Objects and Subjects of Urban Places 

The workshop Narrating Hiedanranta: Stories of Objects and Subjects of Urban Places was held in Tampere, Finland, from 8 – 10 June 2022. The three-day workshop took place in a former industrial complex called Hiedanranta, located on the shores of Lake Näsijärvi and inhabited by diverse cultural actors/activists that work on individual as well as collective projects rendering a unique, haptic, and creative character to the site. The area, however, is currently undergoing a dramatic transformation. Due to a large urban development project, the material substrate of the site as well as the internal dynamics of Hiedanranta are being affected. Some buildings have already been demolished and several cultural actors have been permanently displaced. Within this context, the local organizing team in Tampere - Elina Alatalo, Dalia Milían Bernal and Panu Lehtovuori - organized the workshop to gather, understand and retell the stories of different actors and their relationship to their sites of action exploring visual methods, poetic practices, and narrative interviews. Read more on our webpage.

The three-day workshop kicked off with a powerful and thought-provoking presentation by professor Luc Pauwels about visual methods and their trajectory and history within the social sciences, followed by a guided walk through the different spaces in Hiedanranta. And in the evening, all the participants gathered in a café in the city center of Tampere to learn the story of different grassroots movements in the city through short films - a visual tour guided by Dalia Milián Bernal and Elina Alatalo joined by some of the members active in some of the places presented. You may watch the recording here.

Thinking & Experiencing Urban Places

Organized and hosted by İstanbul Bilgi University Department of International Relations, Turkey, the Seminar New Ways of Thinking about/and Experiencing Urban Places: ’77 Minor Terms for Writing Urban Places’ gathered our COST Action members Sernaz Arslan, Giuseppe Resta, Sonja Novak and Klaske Havik on June 9, 2022.

COST Connect – New European Bauhaus

On 9 and 10 June, our action vice-chair Susana Oliveira and communication manager Jorge Mejía Hernández participated in an event with other COST Actions related to the creative industries and the built environment. Read more on our website.

The city and the myth:
Journey to Çanakkale 

The fieldwork organized by Giuseppe Resta, 18 – 20 July 2022, consisted of landscape explorations of what is believed to be the setting of the mythic Troy, overlooking the Dardanelles strait. Following the outdoor itineraries, the participants produced a photographic essay and collected a personal visual interpretation of Çanakkale, writing a short fictional piece accompanying their visual material, collected in a personal travelogue, which will reflect the experience of the journey that each participant took on in Çanakkale, exploring the narrative potential of the myth and the site.

Skopje Brutalism Trail 

The fieldwork organized by Slobodan Velevski, Marija Mano Velevska, Blagoja Bajkovski and Ana Rafailovska, 28-30 September 2022 in Skopje, North Macedonia, focused on buildings from the brutalist legacy of the city dating from the 1970s and were approached from a theatrical perspective. The aim was to explore the meaningfulness of architecture that goes beyond the discursive or visual observations of spatial attributes. During the workshop, the participants established their own relationship with a particular abandoned building in a lively residential area in the city of Skopje. Following onsite investigations, they developed their personal understanding of the workshop’s three main themes: brutalism (brutalist architecture), solidarity/community building and creative writing in relation to the abandoned building.

STSM Grants 2022 

“My Osijek: Other Perspectives of Dwelling the City” 
Angeliki Sioli

The project “My Osijek: Other Perspectives of Dwelling the City” took me to the mid-sized Croatian city Osijek at the end of August 2022. I had the chance to examine two novels, that describe the city, and juxtapose them to the contemporary urban and human topography. These novels were: A Past Rescued From Oblivion (originally published in German, Croatian 1994/ English 2020) by Wilma Vukelich (1850-1956) and Unterstadt (2009) by Ivana Šojat Kuči (born in 1971). They both capture Osijek, transitioning from the 19th to the 20th Century, with remarkable historical accuracy. Unterstadt additionally describes the city at the beginning of the 21st Century, as its protagonist returns to Osijek to discover the (hi)story of her family. Both novels are written by female authors, have female protagonists, and portray the struggles of different communities (families of German descent and Jewish respectively) in their attempt to integrate and define their identity within the urban context. Read more here.

STSM Grants 2022 

Urban Mythologies 
Sergios Strigklogiannis

Through the Short Term Scientific Mission of  ‘Writing Urban Places’, the research was brought to the city of Basel in order, on the one hand, to get acquainted with local myths and the way they are visible in the city, and on the other to analyse how the main narratives (and counter-narratives) are connected with specific urban issues of the city. The research focus was inspired by the rivalry between two parts of the city Kleinbasel and Grossbasel which has its roots in certain historical events and is dramatized in its public spaces and in local folklore stories and myths.  Read more here.

WG3 has had a very active and inspiring year. Following the call for contributions to the Repository of Methods — which opened in December —  in early Spring, we held an open meeting to invite network members to contribute to the Repository of Methods (book) and offered a Q&A session to discuss the call. By the deadline, we had received almost 50 contributions. In June, WG3 helped organize the Narrating Hiedanranta workshop in Tampere, where several group members met to brainstorm future activities. In July, our working group supported the workshop in Çanakkale. Currently, we are focusing on the final stages of the editing process of the Repository of Methods book, which we hope will be available soon. This book is the result of a collective effort that will offer a set of methods and assignments to stimulate new approaches in architecture, urban planning, other fields of spatial development, and urban studies. It is also intended to invite creative, often embodied, sometimes playful engagements with the material and immaterial dimensions of urban places, within academia and beyond. Following the publication of the Repository of Methods, WG3 will start working on a book chapter that will discuss the role of urban narratives and the methods to locate, understand and construct them whilst reflecting on the efforts and activities of WG3 to find and gather such methods. Upcoming year, our working group will focus on disseminating the book and, in collaboration with other working groups, we will organize one or two activities to encourage members to use the Repository of Methods (book), undertake one assignment, and report back at our final meeting in Delft.  

The Grand Period 3 of our COST Action was mostly dedicated to organizing a series of fieldwork events in different mid-sized European cities. Working Group 4 (WG 4) as the responsible party has supported and coordinated all initiated fieldwork events from March to late September 2022. Namely, the doctoral training school that was held in Osijek and the first fieldwork workshop in Tampere, Finland that were organized in the first half of the year, and the ones in Çanakkale, Turkey and Skopje, N. Macedonia, in the second part of the year. Workshops in Çanakkale and Skopje were organized within three days, The city and the myth: journey to Çanakkale took place between 18-20 July, while Skopje Brutalism Trail unfolded from 28-30 September. In accordance with the previously established praxis of fieldwork events, the last one will take place in Tirana. This initiative is planned to take part in the mid of March 2023, thus complementing the framework of activities planned for the grand period 4 of the Action. The call for participation for this workshop will be announced on our website no later than November 30, 2022. The team of WG4 is also involved in two editorial initiatives of the Action. The first one refers to the completion of the latest issue of Writing Places Journal No. 7. Currently, this issue is in its final stage of the peer review process and editing and is planned to be published by the end of October 2022. This issue will have a series of texts that approach fieldwork case studies not as a critical overview of historical examples, but as fieldwork cases comprehended and afterward critically examined by the authors of the texts themselves. Members of our working group are also involved in the process of preparing the book dedicated to the activities and research topics of the COST Action CA18126 Writing Urban Places: New Narratives of the European City. For this purpose, they will provide the necessary coordination among each of the contributing parties in the following period.