XClose

UCL News

Menu

UCL hosts Planning Research Conference

3 April 2006

This year's annual Planning Research Conference will be hosted by the UCL Bartlett School of Planning from 5-7 April 2006.

'Global Places, Local Spaces' will examine one of the key dilemmas facing planners across the world: how can planning deliver sustainable local spaces in the face of ever more powerful global forces?

Professor Matthew Carmona, Head of the UCL Bartlett School of Planning said: "This is one of the major problems facing planners today. In England, for example, sustainable development is now the legally defined rationale for the new system of spatial planning, yet a laissez-faire approach to regional development is increasingly funnelling investment towards the over-heated South East with profound economic, social and environmental effects across the country."

Similar issues are affecting many other countries throughout the world, a fact reflected in the breadth of home countries from which the speakers are drawn, making this a truly international conference. Among the many papers being given are: "Is there anything 'glocal' in multiplex cinemas? The case of Greece", by Alex Deffner  (University of Thessaly), a paper on 'The Unsustainability of Sustainability by Administration' from Rachel Berney (University of California, Berkeley) and 'Contested spaces: The (mis)use of space in urban South Africa' by Mchunu Koyi (University of Johannesburg).

Keynote speakers include Sir Peter Hall, former chairman of the Town and Country Planning Association and Professor of Planning at the UCL Bartlett, and Sir Terry Farrell, one of the UK's leading architects and urbanists and a visiting professor at the UCL Bartlett. To find out more about the conference, use the link at the bottom of this article.