2022 RSA Winter Conference Special Sessions

Session organisers: Laura Polverari, University of Padua, Italy; Ida Musiałkowska, Poznań University of Economics and Business, Poland

An unprecedented amount of resources will be mobilised for the recovery of European economies from the Covid-19pandemic through NextGen EU. In parallel, several EU countries will benefit from significant funding from cohesion policy. The confluence of such substantial amounts of financial resources onto regions and Member States that are facing long-term convergence problems combined with the challenges of post-pandemic recovery raises a number of questions as to the relevance, coherence and actual implementation of these two parallel sets of strategies. Concerns have been raised about the lack of involvement of regional and local authorities, and about ‘administrative congestion’ (Polverari 2020), leading to question the degree to which investments will be implemented effectively and efficiently. At the same time, as both sets of strategies are intended to induce major institutional reforms, their tight implementation timetable makes the possibility to achieve the intended reform goals questionable.

We invite abstracts on the following research questions:

• To what extent have NRRPs and Cohesion policy programmes being designed to ensure coherence and synergy? What evidence has been considered and how has this evidence been utilised to ensure coherence?
• How and to what effect have regions and local authorities and other stakeholders been involved in the design of these strategies?
• Do NRRPs explicitly target the catching-up of lagging regions?
• Can the two sets of investments (NRRP’s and Cohesion policy’s) end up displacing each other, whether substantively or interms of implementation timing? Is there a risk of policy drift?
• What political dynamics have the availability of additional EU funds through the NextGenEU and RRF triggered? To what extent have these altered the relations between national States and regional and local authorities?
• What implications for economic policies arise when analysing goals of NRRP’s and Cohesion policy?

We are interested in paper proposals using diverse theoretical frameworks and following different methodological traditions within political sciences and cognate fields. We encourage submissions from early career researchers and those who are underrepresented within academia. We aim to publish a special issue in a respectable journal including the best paper presented. This call is co-sponsored by the Regional Studies Association’s Research Network on Cohesion Policy (CP-Net). Both single-country and comparative papers will be welcome.

Session organisers: Martina Pardy, London School of Economics, UK; Carolin Ioramashvili, City-REDI, University of Birmingham, UK

A growing concentration of industries and the resultant growth in market power has received increasing attention from a macroeconomic perspective, for example with respect to product market concentration (De Loecker et al. 2020), innovation concentration (Forman and Goldfarb, 2021), or the role of superstar firms in the global economy (Autor et al., 2020). Some prominent antitrust cases in the European Union and the United States, in particular around technology platforms, have attracted public attention, but research shows that the phenomenon affects a diverse range of industries and many countries (DeLoecker & Eeckhout, 2018; Philippon, 2019). Declining competition is manifested in increasing industry concentration or higher price mark-ups over cost (Autor et al., 2020; De Loecker & Eeckhout, 2017; Grullon, Larkin, & Michaely, 2019). Special attention has been paid to the implications for prices, labour shares, employment conditions and wages, and general economic dynamism.

However, this emerging literature has so far paid little attention to the geographical dimension of these trends. Relatively little is known about concentration within certain regions – leaving it untapped which regional factors contribute to this rise in concentration, as well as the consequences within and between regions. Technological change and globalisation are often seen as key drivers of industry dynamics, affecting most and least productive firms (Autor et al., 2020), but has also overlooked the regional perspective. Feldman, Guy and Iammarino (2021) argue for the important role of monopoly power combined with agglomeration economies in the rise of technology clusters, and in turn their role in shaping regional inequalities in the US. However, there are also opposing views: Hsieh et al argue that growing concentration in the aggregate has resulted in increasing competition at the local level in service industries, with positive effects on consumers.

The special session seeks to explore these themes further, and from different angles. More evidence is needed to understand the concentration of firms and industries within certain regions, as these might affect welfare, wages and productivity. In particular, but not exclusively, we encourage submissions relating to the impacts of market power, industry concentration, monopoly and monopsony on:

• Local labour markets, income inequality within and between places
• Entrepreneurship, industry dynamics and productivity
• Innovation, the location of innovative activity, and knowledge diffusion
• Entrepreneurial, supply chain and innovation networks, including gatekeeping
• Evidence focusing on industries other than tech
• Evidence from outside the United States and comparative research across countries and regions

For questions, please contact the session organisers, Martina Pardy (m.l.pardy@lse.ac.uk) or Carolin Ioramashvili (c.ioramashvili@bham.ac.uk).

Extended urbanization has become a key feature of 21st-century capitalism (Brenner 2019; Keil, 2018; Keil and Wu, 2022). The city-region is a new spatial form of urban development driven by economic globalization, agglomeration, and neoliberal governance (Scott, 2001; Scott, 2019). But city-regional governance also reveals multi-scalar geopolitics to secure the social production of capital accumulation at the sub-national scale (Jonas and Moisio, 2018). This special session calls for papers  rethink the state and development strategies in the post-pandemic era. We welcome papers on different regions of the world.

Some papers in the session may use China as an example to investigate the new trend of metropolitan development and city-regional governance. Recently, China has seen a new wave of mega-city region development (Yeh et al, 2021). As Chinabecomes the ‘workshop of the world’, Chinese mega-city regions are the powerhouses of its economy. To promote thecompetitive city-region, the local state adopts the strategy of ‘planning for growth’ through building so-called ‘city clusters’(Wu, 2015). The development of major mega-city regions such as the Greater Bay Area of Guangdong, Hong Kong andMacau will reconfigure China’s political and economic landscape. The role of the state in regional governance is a salientfeature (Wu and Zhang, 2022). The Chinese city-regionalism represents the state’s effort to remedy the crisis of urbanentrepreneurialism at the regional scale and advance national development strategies. Facing uncertainties in globalization, changing geopolitics, and new smart technologies in the post- pandemic era, what is the current trend of city-regional governance? This special session calls for an investigation of diverse development practices at the metropolitan and mega-city region scales and various governance aspects (see, for example, the scope of topics). We particularly welcome a‘grounded’ interpretation (Zhang et al, 2022).

The scope of topics
The contributions may include but are not limited to the following topics:

• Studies of major megacities and their regions
• Reflection of development models and city-regional governance
• The role of the state in regional governance
• Regional institutional reforms, governance mechanisms and tools
• Planning strategies, discourses for city-regionalism, and new regional initiatives
• Regional or cross-border infrastructure development, coordination and financialization
• Smart regional governance, technocratic regionalism, and governmentalities
• Regional issues of governance such as the environment and labour mobility
• The post-pandemic regional development

Special session papers have an option to be considered by an ongoing journal special issue in Transactions in Planning and urban Research.

Session organisers: Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins, Countryside and Community Research Institute, UK; Joanie Willett, University of Exeter, UK; Rhiannon Pugh, Lund University, Sweden

The political and academic rediscovery of so-called ‘left-behind places’ and ‘geographies of discontent’ has ignited new interest in peripheral regions – or, at least, become the de rigueur reference for discussing unequal geographies (and what to do about them). Yet, as the quantitative flurry abates, both research and policy must look beyond headline narratives that collapse the complex diversities of the myriad places that are ‘non-core’, or on the ‘edge’ of core activities, including but not limited to rural, semi-rural, post-industrial, de-populating and sparsely populated areas. That too many places have not mattered for too long calls for new ways of reckoning with peripherality: Edgy Matters.

Building from #RinR22, this session continues critical conversations from among a growing community of researchers who are working to reinvigorate the study of peripherality within (and beyond) regional studies. Together, we take up two key tasks. First, we debate emerging theorisations of peripheral places and peripheralising processes that reveal, problematise and challenge the social, spatial, economic, environmental, and temporal inter-relationships that impact on how peripheries are imagined. Second, we explore the contributions that peripheries can and do offer, and the consequent tensions between extractive practices and innovative possibilities.
We welcome papers that share the Edgy Matters ethos, and critically engage with questions of peripherality, broadly conceived. We especially invite scholars with interest in a future Edgy Matters collaborative research network. Potential topics might include:

• Types of peripherality (e.g. rural, remote, post-industrial, topological, peripheries-within-cores).
• Reinterpreting the relationships between cores and peripheries.
• Peripheries as spaces of exploitation, extraction, and innovation.
• Disciplinary perspectives on peripherality (e.g. economic geography, rural sociology).
• Peripherality in territorial policy and sustainable developmental pathways.
• Local economic futures and territorial well-being in peripheral places.

Session organisers: Karel Van den Berghe and Marcin Dabrowski, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands; Joanna Williams, University College London, UK

Circularity policies and strategies are emerging across the world, however, they tend to overlook the spatial implications of ‘going circular’ and the potentials that circular economy brings to rethink regional and urban economies, regenerate degraded urban and peri-urban areas, and promote social cohesion and bottom-up community activity.

This session invites researchers that enact on the spatial implications/requirements of the circular economy transition. We are open for empirical, methodological, or theoretical work.

Session Organisers: Henry Endemann, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR; Evert Meijers, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

The term “megaregion” is regularly used in academia and beyond. Its definition remains fuzzy, but it is broadly used to describe somewhat novel and large networks of metropolitan centers and their surrounding urban landscapes. Moreover, there is widespread agreement that the megaregion is a decisive unit for the global economy and the planet’s ecology.
While processes of mega-regionalization have been carefully examined across urban and regional studies for many decades, the enormous economic power of the megaregion as a label and a status is increasingly recognized by a much broader set of stakeholders. Therefore, the emergence and transformation of megaregions has implications across all sustainability dimensions, across various scales and disciplines. Megaregional futures are shaped by designers, planners, economists, and engineers alike. This forms a complex collective challenge for research.

This special session discusses innovative approaches to investigate contemporary forms of mega-regionalization and, thereby, potentially challenge the current perception of megaregions. This may include critically discussing theories, constructing new conceptual frameworks, conducting (comparative) case studies, or testing new methods. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome, presenting insights from design, planning, management, or other fields to help advance regional studies. The key commonality of papers in this session is their focus on megaregions as an administrative or economic unit, and the investigation of the dynamics or effects of mega-regionalization respectively. Case studies may focus on one or multiple megaregions in any part of the world.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• analysis of institutional dynamics in megaregions
• design research methods for megaregional futures
• exploring the role of the civil society in megaregions
• the use and misuse of the megaregions as a status or label
• distinguishing the megaregion from related concepts, such as polycentric urban regions
• the intersection of mega-regionalization with other urbanization processes
• patterns of functional relationships in megaregions
• the development of megaregional territorial identities

The session will be organized in a “fishbowl” format, where presenters first give a classic (slide-)presentation and then join a core discussion panel to have a fast-paced debate, occasionally joined by participants from the audience. This keeps the focus on megaregions while allowing for diverse inputs on the nuances across geographies and approaches.

Session Organisers: Robin Chang, RWTH Aachen University, Germany; Nadezda Krasilnikova, TU Dortmund University, Germany; Rebecca Windemer and Elahe Karimnia, University of the West of England; Nadine Appelhans, TU Berlin, Germany

Before the backdrop of environmental and economic crises, sustainability was considered imperative in urban and regional transitions. However, the ways to implement sustainability-oriented initiatives and resulting impacts depend not just on different socio-spatial perspectives but also on how time and temporalities considered. These inform implementation through policy craft and regulatory processes and might focus on multi-level perspectives that range from local to (supra)regional development as well as temporal horizons that range from months, through decades and generations. Exploring the relations between these levels and horizons provides occasion for this panel to clarify how diverse conceptualisations interweaving time or temporality and space undergird sustainability aims in planning processes.

Yet, time and temporality are inherent to these imperatives (such as, but not limited to those articulated through the sustainable Development Goals) but not fully explored or articulated with regards to how conceptualisations thereof might constraint or contribute to the advancement of sustainability. More precisely, the orientations, sensitivities, and commitments to certain temporalities (including, but not limited to their cycles, horizons, etc.) can either encourage or inhibit certain interactions across specific socio-spatial scales. Understanding how and which impacts or effects these interactions create in space are just as important as navigating them as they emerge in time. Similarly, whether the sources of these temporal intentions, be it economic assets or political decisions, might be spontaneous or planned, could also produce synergies and strains for sustainable transitions. We build on work highlighting the nuanced qualities of time including its multiplicity, rhythms, and trajectories. These mutually implicate other planning and management process through multi-scalar change and invite us to reflect on, and rethink how time and in particular temporalities relate to the transition processes for urban, suburban, and rural areas.

A reflection of temporal implications is crucial to highlight conceptual blind spots, appropriate or gaps in methods and could contribute to sustainable approaches through which cities and regions transition through uncertainty. Careful rethinking on temporal implications is required to redefine or shape the policy craft and instruments or combinations thereof amenable to supporting transitions towards sustainability through interactions and interventions. These could present new ideas such as entrainment, re-work and build on existing concepts such as time geographic principles or rhythmanalysis as well as other models for urban transitions. Interested participants are encouraged to submit contributions that highlight or introduce temporal concepts that have been uncovered in on-the-ground case studies and relate these to current sustainability transitions discourses. This advances constructive conversations on how to develop time-sensitivity in scholarly or policy discourses, applied practices, and methodologies in urban and regional contexts.
Questions participants could consider in their submissions for this panel:

• How is time/temporality framed for (sustainable) transition?
• How inclusive is this temporal framing of (sustainable) transition?
• Who benefits from particular temporal understandings of (sustainable) transition?
• At which scale is the locus of impact or intervention placed or envisioned?
• How are stakeholders benefitting or hindered from a temporal approach in planning and management processes or practises?
• Does integrating time and temporality require new roles and responsibilities?

Session Organisers: Komali Kantamaneni, University of Central Lancashire, UK; Carlos Jimenez Bescos, Oslo University, Norway

Several environmental and socio-economic problems are emerging year by year in megacities across the world (Gurjar, Butler et al. 2008, Gao and O’Neill 2020). However, the global south is suffering more intensively (Srivastava 2020) when compared with other western cities due to a variety of reasons such as rapid urbanisation, climate changes, high-intensity rainfall trends, etc. These events damaged the infrastructure significantly and generated more fiscal problems, which put pressure on local, regional and national economies. On the other hand, communities that are below and/or in the middle of the poverty line are more vulnerable to environmental and socio-economic challenges. COVID-19 enhances these socio-economic challenges in megacities such as Mumbai, Dhaka, Wuhan, New Delhi, etc.

To know the updated circumstances within the context of environmental and social-economic challenges, more innovative methods are needed by combining science, engineering and social science research methods/tools. Therefore, this session focuses on innovative ways to evaluate global megacities’ diverse environmental and socio-economic challenges.

We welcome submissions within the context of global megacities: Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

1. Climate change and socio-economic problems
2. Environmental disasters
3. Environmental problems and policy and decision making
4. Environment and socio-economic challenges impact on regional, sub-regional and national economics
5. Adaption and mitigation
6. Risk assessment
7. GIS and spatial tools

Session Organisers: Sergio Montero, Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia; Vanesa Castán Broto, University of Sheffield, UK; Lars Coenen, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway; Emilia Smeds, University of Westminster, UK

Experimental approaches to governance and policymaking have mushroomed around the world, seeking new ways of intervening in pressing urban and regional problems such as environmental pollution, economic development, or infrastructural issues (Coenen & Morgan, 2020; Evans, Karvonen & Raven, 2016; Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013). The recent emergence of the “New Urban Science” (Karvonen, 2020; Barnett, 2020; Derudder & Van Meeteren, 2019), local climate city networks (Smeds & Acuto, 2018), the popularization of smart cities (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2019) as well as mission-oriented innovation and industrial policy (Mazzucato et al., 2020) have also contributed to the proliferation of different policy experiments and innovation laboratories at the local and regional levels (Marques & Morgan, 2018). Postcolonial scholars and critical designers have also looked at the potential emancipatory outcomes of experimentation, co-production and laboratories to transform policy beyond traditional top-down planning approaches in cities and regions of the Global South (Escobar, 2020; Simone & Pieterse, 2017; Patel et al., 2015; Ferreira & Botero, 2020).

To ‘solve’ and promote transitions towards sustainability, experimental approaches trial, test and (re)scale new policies, infrastructures, and technologies in conjunction with seemingly more democratic approaches such as co-design, co-production, and participatory planning in various urban and regional contexts. Across these multiple domains, calls for regional transitions and policy innovation around climate change mitigation and adaptation is reshaping politics and governance, yet also risks cementing specific forms of climate or sustainability governance and policy. For instance, policy innovation and experiments have often been limited by their reliance on Northern policy imaginaries originating about what an innovative and smart city-region should be (Datta, 2018), to a small set of globally mobile “best practices” and urban solutions (Montero, 2020) or to sustainability initiatives that do not promote substantial institutional transformations (Castán Broto et al., 2019).

In this panel we seek to engage with contemporary discussions in urban and regional studies on the possibilities and limits of experimental governance and policy innovation to facilitate regional transitions towards more inclusive and sustainable futures. Advancing our understanding of the institutional geography of spatially uneven regional sustainability transitions (Coenen et al., 2012) across the Global North and the South requires new relational approaches and methodologies to better conceptualize varieties of experimental governance (Ansell and Bartenberger, 2016), their intersections with globally ‘mobile’ policies (Veldhuizen & Coenen, 2022; Montero & Baiocchi, 2022) as well as the local and regional politics of experimentation in the field of sustainability and climate policy (Bulkeley et al., 2016). This includes also critical understandings of different varieties of experimentation in relation to debates about revised and more expansive definitions of urban entrepreneurialism and municipalism (Lauermann, 2017; Swilling & Hajer, 2017; Thompson et al., 2020; Phelps & Miao, 2020) that recognise the co-existence of experimentation associated to both speculative, ‘policy boosterist’ and financialized regional politics and policies as well as emancipatory, locally-grounded varieties of grassroot experimentation with a critical commitment towards just sustainability transitions (Smith & Stirling, 2018).

We welcome submissions on these intersecting topics and debates and are particularly excited about contributions that explore one or more of the following themes:

• The politics and spatiality of experimentation within regional and innovation policy: clusters, smart specialization strategies, innovation districts, etc.
• How experimentation may be discursively and/or relationally rescaling climate change governance so that the ‘regional scale’ becomes a critical policy space.
• The relation between policy mobilities and experimentation in regional policymaking, including ‘what moves’ and ‘doesn’t move’, through what actors, networks, circuits, etc.
• Different practices or techniques that can help imagine and implement alternative futures, particularly beyond North-originated development visions and policy models.
• The relationship between policy experiments and specific institutional challenges and transformations (e.g. differences in role of the state; geopolitics of the environment, etc.)
• Experimentalism, city networks and platform governance related to questions about who orchestrates experimentation and to what purpose (government, philanthropy, corporate, etc.).
• Experimentalism and the limits of solutionism, including reflections around the possibilities and limits of nature-based solutions.
• Methodological strategies and tactics to analyze the role of experiments, co-production, laboratories or other ways in which policy innovation is taking place in different regions across the North and South.

Session Organiser: Flavia Martinelli, Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, Italy

Since the year 2000 less developed regions in the EU (formerly ‘Objective 1’, then ‘Convergence’ regions) have been entrusted with the task of formulating and implementing their own Cohesion policy strategies and programmes. Three programming cycles have now been implemented (2000-2006, 2007-2013, and 2014-2020), but policy implementation and development performance have been very unequal among regions (EU 8^th Cohesion Report, 2022), with some regions better capable of engaging resources and recording positive growth rates, and others seemingly ‘trapped’ in their lagging position. This Special session seeks to explore what has happened in EU less developed regions over these twenty years of direct regional programming responsibility. Three sets of questions are addressed:

1. How did the multilevel governance process work? Did it ensure its coherence and subsidiarity aims? Did the ‘regionalized’ programming responsibility change the role and behaviour of regional governments vis-à-vis their local constituencies and the national government? Were Regional governments able to efficiently mobilize and coordinate local actors? Did a learning process occur in the regional programming capabilities over time?
2. How much community-led and integrated local development strategies have been promoted by Regional governments? What were their outcomes? Which factors explain their success and/or failure?
3. What are the lessons learned in these twenty years of Regional Operational Programmes in less developed regions? What were the main achievements and/or failures? Which factors – whether endogenous or exogenous – account for such achievements and/or failures? Which factors explain differences in performance among regions? And what can be done to overcome failures, especially in the light of the new pressing challenges ahead?

Papers applying to the Special session are invited to explore these questions, either in a comparative perspective or with regard to specific regional cases.

Session Organiser: Tasos Kitsos, Aston University, UK

The creative and digital industries are at the heart of the post-covid recovery and the transformation to sustainable regional futures. However, their diverse nature means the attention they receive is scattered among disparate research fields. This session aims to bring together academic and policy research on the spatial and socio-economic footprint of creative industries and their relationships to regional economies in the broadest sense. Abstracts are invited (but not limited!) in the following thematic areas:

• The local economic impacts of creative industries
• The role of creative industries as catalysts of regional innovation
• Creative industries and local labour markets
• Creative industries in a net-zero world
• Creative industries in rural regions

For any questions or further information please contact Tasos (a.kitsos@aston.ac.uk)

Session Organisers: Will Eadson, Sheffield Hallam University, UK; Laura Norris, Cardiff University, UK; Camilla Chlebna, Oldenburg University, Germany; Sebastian Losacker, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany; Maria Tsouri, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway

Decarbonisation is impacting decision-making across energy and emission-intensive industries, which will intensify over the coming decade. Foundational sectors like iron and steel, cement and glass production are at the frontline of such change. Industrial decarbonisation involves wide ranging changes to how some sectors operate including industrial processes, investment decisions, supply chains, locational factors and so on. This economic restructuring also has potentially profound impacts for the places where industrial activity happens. The geographic impacts of industrial change are uneven, felt most acutely in places with high concentrations of particular industries.

A place-based perspective to these changes allows us to interrogate how processes of economic change through industrial decarbonisation are enacted, how place-based goals and those for firms/sectors are negotiated, and most importantly what industrial change means for people who live and work in affected places.
As such in this session we invite contributions that explore the relationship between industrial decarbonisation and place, with particular interest in extending or moving beyond popular path development approaches to take a more critical or normative stance on ‘what matters’ to people and places. This might include (but is not limited to) questions around:

• Implications for citizens’ livelihoods and wellbeing, and environmental outcomes
• Implications for work and labour,
• Democratic engagement and participation
• Politics of constructing place-based industrial decarbonisation programmes
• Different models of place-based economic development
• Industrial change and place-based identities
• Alternative perspectives on place as a territorial construct for industrial decarbonisation

We particularly welcome analysis across different places (for instance between different sites in production networks), which situate place-based studies within a relational context.

The special session is hosted by the convenors of the ‘RSA City and Regional Sustainability Transitions Webinar Series’:Camilla Chlebna, Will Eadson, Sebastian Losacker, Laura Norris, and Maria Tsouri.

Organisers: Sebastian Losacker, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany; Laura Norris, Cardiff University, UK; Will Eadson, Sheffield Hallam University, UK; Camilla Chlebna, Oldenburg University, Germany; Maria Tsouri, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway

There has been a recent surge of interest in the fields of regional studies and regional sciences in regional pathways towards sustainability. This has given rise to an emerging field and associated community that is commonly referred to as the Geography of Environmental Innovation and Sustainability Transitions’. Work in this field, however, is very heterogeneous. Sub-communities with differing ontologies co-exist and there is limited interaction between them despite apparent shared concern about sustainable regional development.

We observe, broadly, two core communities in this field. One group tends to focus on the supply side of environmental innovation, mainly addressing the question of how the invention and production of green technologies can be used as an engine for regional development and growth. This community involves, among others, researchers from environmental economics, regional science and economic geography, and commonly adopts an ecological modernisation perspective. Another group of researchers tends to be more concerned with demand aspects of environmental innovation and with system change on the sectoral level, commonly applying a socio-technical perspective on regional transition pathways. This community involves researchers from transitions studies, sociology and human geography, broadly defined.

Given the existential importance of our shared research object it is sobering to acknowledge that both communities tend to remain isolated from one another. We understand that this lack of scholarly exchange is due in part to differences in our preferred methodological approaches where the former community uses predominantly quantitative or econometric models, while the latter tends to work in a more case study-based manner using qualitative research designs.

We seek to bridge this divide and bring both groups into more fruitful dialogue. The aim of this special dialogue session is therefore to discuss potential starting points for such a shared endeavour.

• What would a comprehensive, mixed methods research design for sustainable regional development look like?
• What are existing mixed methods approaches that can be applied to examine regional sustainable development?
• What would be suitable formats to bring our sub-communities into conversation to foster mutual understanding in the first instance, and collaboration around our shared concern in the second?
• What potential do new research methods offer for regional sustainability research?

The session will be open and interactive, run as a participatory workshop. As such we are not issuing a call for papers: instead, we invite colleagues to come along to the session with an open mind and ready to contribute to discussions however they can.

The special session is hosted by the convenors of the ‘RSA City and Regional Sustainability Transitions Webinar Series’: Camilla Chlebna, Will Eadson, Sebastian Losacker, Laura Norris, and Maria Tsouri.