Traditional Wisdom and Modern Knowledge for the Earth’s Future
August 4–August 9, 2013
International Geographical Union
Kyoto, Japan
Over the past decades, globalization and other global changes have re-structured relations between countries and regions in the world, and have greatly altered the world geography. This change has put forward various problems of local, regional or global scales, such as economic imbalance, social fragmentation, political conflicts, and environmental crises. All of these problems threaten the future of the earth. While acknowledging the world’s diversity, geography as a discipline must endeavor to resolve these problems by devising plans for cooperation and symbiotic existence of the different peoples of the world.
An old Japanese proverb (on-ko chi-shin), taken from a Chinese one (wengu zhixin), says that only by exploring the old can one understand the new. We should first understand how traditional ideas, linked to interaction between society/culture and the environment, were formed in different countries and regions. Fortunately, throughout their long histories East Asian countries, including Japan, have fostered a rich wisdom concerning such interaction. Traditional wisdom, in harmony with the environment, remains prevalent. The Regional Conference held in Japan will examine how we can mold the earth’s future through such traditional wisdom and modern knowledge derived from modern geography.
The Kyoto International Conference Center, our proposed venue for the Kyoto Regional Conference (KRC), hosted the 1997 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which gave birth to the famous Kyoto Protocol. Although the Protocol focused on the prevention of global warming, KRC will aim for a comprehensive examination of various problems in the relationship between society/culture and the environment as well as comprehensive discussions about the earth’s future. Kyoto is furthermore the ancient capital of Japan, and is a metropolis with a long history and one that is richly endowed with a wide variety of fascinating sites from the standpoint of “traditional wisdom.”
We note with deep regret that the Great East Japan Earthquake/Tsunami Disaster on March 11, 2011, and the accident of Tokyo Electric Company’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that followed caused very extensive damage. As of early May, 2012, there have been over 15,800 confirmed dead and more than 3,000 unaccounted for. It also displaced a significant number of people. This great tragedy will also be investigated carefully in relation to our conference theme.
Colonial and Postcolonial Urban Planning in Africa
September 5–September 6, 2013
Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon
Lisbon, Portugal
The Conference – Colonial and Postcolonial Urban Planning in Africa – aims to re-examine the history of colonial urban planning in Africa and its legacies in the post-independence period, to learn from contemporary African scholarship, and to discuss how postcolonial urban planning cultures can actually address these urban challenges and contribute effectively for the development of resilient and sustainable cities in Africa.
The Conference to be held in Lisbon, in September 2013, organized by the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning - University of Lisbon and the International Planning History Society (IPHS), will explore two key themes in the history of urban planning in Africa:
· Theme I - 19th and 20th Century Colonial Urban Planning in Africa
· Theme II - Postcolonial Urban Planning in Africa
In both themes we welcome country and cross-country approaches, studies of individual cities, and the comparison of African cities with one another.
Hearing Landscape Critically: Music, Place, and the Spaces of Sound
September 9–September 11, 2013
Stellenbosch University
Stellenbosch, South Africa
Landscapes are divided and dissonant sites of private and collective being. They bear traces of present, past and future ambitions, injustices, and interventions. And yet, their grammars and sounds, whether intimate, commodified or instrumentalised, push at the limits of theory and representation and simultaneously construct systems of aesthetic, ideological, historical and political appropriation.
The second meeting of the ‘Hearing Landscape Critically’ network (Stellenbosch University, 9-11 September 2013) is concerned with finding ways to articulate and listen to landscape that challenge established patterns of cognition and intervention, and which probe the archival and everyday silences and ruptures exacerbated by social, political and intellectual intervention. Following the first meeting at Oxford University, May 2012, the Stellenbosch symposium marks the continuation of an inter-disciplinary and inter-continental project addressing the intersections and cross-articulations of landscape, music, and the spaces of sound. Whilst this symposium aims to bring together a wide-ranging set of subjects and disciplinary approaches, contributions concerned with the unique dynamics of music and sound in (South) African landscapes are especially welcome.
The following themes are envisaged as central concerns:
- Spaces and sounds of power and politics: interpreting reservation, academy, capital, legitimation;
- Spaces and sounds of contestation: how landscapes suture and structure struggles of class, nationality, education, and race;
- Philosophical approaches to the spaces of sound: transcendental metaphors, the nature/culture debate, ontologies and epistemologies, non-representational theories of musical and social space;
- Spaces and sounds of transformation/devastation: ‘junk space’, inter-state freeways, sprawling suburbs, shopping malls, non-places;
- Landscape as utopia, dystopia or heterotopia;
- Urban landscapes, or landscapes that confound simple urban/rural divides.
Keynote speakers:
Prof. Richard Taruskin (Department of Music, University of California, Berkeley)
Prof. Cherryl Walker (Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University)
Intra-urban dynamics and health: concepts, methods and applications
September 11–September 13, 2013
University Paris Ouest Nanterre la Defense
Paris, France
We are pleased to announce the international conference entitled “Intra-urban dynamics and health: concepts, methods and applications”. The aim of this conference is to promote links between researchers, civil society and decision-makers in the field of public health.
This international conference is initiated as part of the new interdisciplinary initiative of the International Council for Science "Health and wellbeing in the changing urban environment : a system analysis approach" and by the laboratory of Health Geography from Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense University and the French National Network of local Decision makers for Public Health « Elus, Santé Publique & Territoires» (www.espt.asso.fr/)
This council is supported by 9 organization invested in Urban Health and 22 Universities all over the world.
This international conference will be the first in a series of conferences that will be hold in different régions of the world over four consecutive years : Asia in 2014, Latin America in 2015, Africa in 2016
Modern Walks: Human Locomotion during the Long Nineteenth Century, c. 1800 -1914
September 13–September 14, 2013
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
The nineteenth century was a century of movement. Trains sped passengers across previously unimaginable distances, radically transforming our conceptions of time and distance. Steamboats chugged up rivers and across oceans, provided heretofore unimagined possibilities for travel, trade, and migration. Within cities, trams and subways redefined the urban experience and the urban landscape. Bicycles and – by the turn of the century—automobiles opened another chapter in the history of man and machine united in motion. Yet scholars have often overlooked a simple fact: people continued to walk. Indeed, this most basic of human functions arguably took on an increasing number of forms and meanings as the nineteenth century progressed. The window shopper, commuter, tourist, and trespasser made their appearances on the world stage. Stone-paved sidewalks, new rural pathways and public parks became available to the pedestrian. Old rituals such as the pilgrimage and the promenade adapted to the modern age. Newer practices, such as organized marching, rambling, hiking, and mountain-walking established themselves as important features of social and cultural life.
This conference seeks to explore the many various practices of walking that persisted and emerged around the world in the course of the nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth century. Our goal is not only to offer a new perspective on the history of movement but to ask what walks and walking might reveal about some of the major themes in nineteenth-century global history such as urbanization, industrialization, commodification, and imperialism. In short, how does our perspective on the nineteenth century change if we ask how people put one foot in front of the other, and for what purpose?