PROCEEDINGS OF CITTA 13TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON PLANNING RESEARCH: PLANNING FOR HUMAN SCALE CITIES

After the interruption of the traditional annual CITTA conference in 2020 (the conference series started in 2008), due to all the initial doubts and uncertainties that characterised the first months of the Covid pandemic, the Centre’s management board decided to go ahead with the 2021 conference, this time online. The board was very much aware of the difficulties the organizing team would face given the persistence of the pandemic and the then-generalised lockdown situation in the country. Still, a group of researchers, headed by Cecília Silva, decided to prepare and submit a proposal to CITTA’s internal call for the organization of the conference. One of the motivating reasons for this decision had to do with the closing of the BooST research project – Boosting cycling strategies in starter cycling cities – and the possibility to articulate the final conference of this project with CITTA’s 13th annual conference on planning research.

The organizing team chose “Planning for human scale cities” as the main topic and title of the conference. The revisitation of this recurrent topic in planning was very justified. Over a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, cities all over the world have been experiencing unprecedented changes and challenges. Never before has the importance attached to local scale proximity, to the sense of place and of the closeness of neighbourhoods, as well as to the quality of public spaces and of local services, become so evident. As the introductory text to the conference emphasises, a human-centred approach is much needed these days, focussing on fostering the user-friendliness of the urban environment and on generating lively and liveable cities.

This book of proceedings includes nine texts out of over 50 conference presentations. The range of topics covered by this collection of texts, as well as the diverse origins of the authors/presenters, is fairly representative of the debate that took place in the various plenary and parallel sessions of the conference. As expected, the discussions’ common denominator centred on the different approaches to human-scale city planning.

A final word of thanks to the team of the BooST project, including the colleagues from Aveiro University, to all the members of the organizing committee, and in particular to Cecília Silva, the conference chair, and, last but not least, to the two keynote speakers, Marco te Brömmesltroet from the University of Amsterdam, and Carlos Moreno from the Pantheon Sorbonne University, for their most inspiring and thought-provoking addresses.