Urbanization in the wider geographical area of the European South has had its own trajectory during the whole of the 20th century. In the contemporary “urban age”, newly arising socio-environmental challenges, population flows, planetary environmental problems and technological developments interweave with the contextual specificities of social, environmental, cultural, institutional and political frameworks and their transformations. New conditions of urbanization are continuously produced in every place. In every city everyday spaces are produced anew. Thus, a wide and dynamic research field opens up: the documentation and analysis of urban space as well as the empirical investigation of social, political, cultural and environmental phenomena as produced and reproduced in the different urban environments of Southern Europe in their dialectical encounter with trends in other cities and developments in regional, national or global context. The Research Unit aims at a systematic study and documentation of the specificities of the cities of the European South in the European and the global context and its dialectic encounter with the global discussion. Beyond the critical adaptation of hegemonic discourses about the city, the aim is to produce new contextualized theoretical perspectives, concepts and hermeneutics.
The Research Unit pursues research with regard to the contemporary planning and socio-environmental challenges of cities in the European South and in the South-Eastern Mediterranean in the framework of regional and global urbanization processes. Hence, the Unit supports education and research in the knowledge fields of urban studies (contemporary urban trends, cultures and phenomena), and planning (urban design, urban planning and urban development policies) with the necessary data osmoses between them.
The Research Unit activities within funded and non-funded research projects unfold over:
a) Basic research on contemporary cities, critical urban phenomena and real challenges of cities that are either formed through space or manifested in space (urban diagnostics and urban dynamics) as these are approached in the field of urban geography and urban political ecology, i.e.:
- Documentation, historical analysis of urban transformations and reconstitution of urban morphologies and urban functions in city-centres, in residential areas and in areas of urban sprawl
- Documentation and analysis of attributes, contemporary mutations and re-intrepretations of public space (e.g. emerging roles of the private sector and the civil society, multiple expressions of urban cultures)
- Surveying and documentation of the characteristics and dynamics of urban communities (e.g. refugees, migrants, different age or ethnic groups, gender, etc.) and newly formed urban identities
- Critical analysis of urban interventions and projects, legislative texts and statutory regulations (e.g. network analysis of agents, institutions, procedures and processes, results, effects by gender, etc.).
b) Applied research in the field of urban and regional planning and urban development, i.e.:
- Briefing strategic urban plans on the intersection of urban design with the protection of the natural environment and the landscape
- Documenting conditions of urban degradation and drawing up plans and processes of urban regeneration
- Developing analytical standards, specifications and institutional responses to contemporary urban planning and urban management processes in the context of international and European policies (e.g. climate change adaptation, gender mainstreaming)
- Drawing up plans and procedures for implementing residential programs for vulnerable groups (e.g. refugees, immigrants, Roma, elderly people)
- Mediation-advocacy services between institutions and local communities and participatory processes of urban planning and urban design.
Co-ordinators of the Research Unit support the educational needs of the undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Development within the School of Architecture and supervise PhD theses. They aim at the gradual construction of a scientific network to study the specific urbanization processes and attributes in the European South, broadening their current scientific collaboration with colleagues at the School of Architecture and the School of Spatial Planning and Development, and their already formed academic collaboration with research groups of AUTh and other higher education institutions and research centers in Greece and abroad. They also seek to collaborate with public authorities responsible for urban planning and urban design and other scientific and social bodies. They carry out scientific papers and publications and they organize conferences, public lectures, workshops and seminars.