Building Bridges: Cities and Regions in a Transnational World
- Opening Plenary Session (Prof. Iain Begg, Professorial Research Fellow at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK)
- Opening Plenary Session (Prof. Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, Director of the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA in Regional Economies)
- Plenary 2 – EU Cohesion Policy with Reflection on Third Country Liaisons (Dr. Andrea Mairate, Head of Competence Center “Macro-regions and European Territorial Cooperation” in the Directorate for Territorial Cooperation, Macro-regions and North-West Europe, Belgium)
- Plenary 2 – EU Cohesion Policy with Reflection on Third Country Liaisons (Prof. Philip McCann, The University of Groningen Endowed Chair of Economic Geography, The Netherlands)
- Plenary 3 – Immigration, Migration and Refugees (Prof. Jenny Phillimore, Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS), University of Birmingham, UK
) - Plenary 3 – Immigration, Migration and Refugees (Dr. Martin Kahanec, Associate Professor at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary)
- Plenary 3 – Immigration, Migration and Refugees (Dr. Erka Çaro, University of Jyväskylä, Finland – Early Career Plenary Speaker)
- Plenary 4 – Building bridges – macroregional perspectives (Prof. Ewald Engelen, University of Amsterdam)
- Plenary 4 – Building bridges – macroregional perspectives (Dr. Wolfgang Schüssel, Former Federal Chancellor of Austria (2000 -2007), Austria)
- After Gala Dinner Speech (Mag. Hubert Patterer )
Opening Plenary Session
Prof. Iain Begg, Professorial Research Fellow at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Title of the presentation: What can regional studies tell us about why we have an EU Cohesion Policy, and does it make sense?
Iain Begg is a Professorial Research Fellow at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also currently a Senior Fellow on the ‘UK in a Changing Europe’ initiative, funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council. His main research work is on the political economy of European integration and EU economic governance. He has directed and participated in a series of research projects on different facets of EU policy, including work on the effectiveness and future of the EU’s Cohesion Policy, future employment prospects in the EU, fiscal policy coordination and reform of the EU budget. He recently served as a specialist adviser to the House of Lords European Communities Committee for an inquiry into ‘Genuine Economic and Monetary Union’, completed in 2014, and has held a similar role for previous inquiries into Cohesion Policy and the EU budget. He has undertaken a number of other advisory roles and is a frequent contributor to international conferences on EU economic policy issues.
Opening Plenary Session
Prof. Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, Director of the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA in Regional Economies
Title of the presentation: Linkages and Structural Transformation
Dr Geoffrey J.D. Hewings is Director of the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as an Emeritus Professor in the Departments of Geography, Economics, Agricultural and Consumer Economics, Urban and Regional Planning and Institute of Government and Public Affairs. His undergraduate degree is from University of Birmingham, England and masters and doctorate from the University of Washington, Seattle. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, he served on the faculties of the University of Kent (UK) and the University of Toronto. He has served as a visiting professor at universities in Australia, Israel, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and China. He received awards from the Fulbright Commission, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and was designated a University Scholar by the University of Illinois. He received a doctorate, honoris causa, from the University of Bourgogne. He has been elected a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International, the Western Regional Science Association and the International Input-Output Association.
Professor Hewings main research areas are in the fields of urban and regional analysis, with a strong emphasis on the development and application of large-scale models. His research activities are centered in the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory (REAL), a unit he co-founded in 1989.
His publications include 14 books, 76 book chapters and 187 articles in major professional journals; he has supervised over 50 doctoral dissertations (more detail available at www.real.illinois.edu).
Plenary 2 – EU Cohesion Policy with Reflection on Third Country Liaisons
Dr. Andrea Mairate, Head of Competence Center “Macro-regions and European Territorial Cooperation” in the Directorate for Territorial Cooperation, Macro-regions and North-West Europe, Belgium
Dr. Andrea Mairate was born in Tangier (Morocco) in 1957. He studied Economics in Grenoble and Paris where he got a Ph.d. After qualification, he started an academic career as lecturer and researcher in applied economics in Paris. In 1989, he worked in Rome as research director in a privately funded research centre in a variety of areas from industrial economics and telecommunications to European policies. In 1994 he joined the European Commission in the area of regional policy, held managerial posts in evaluation, economic analysis, policy coordination and audit. He is currently Head of Competence Center “Macro-regions and European Territorial Cooperation” in the Directorate for Territorial Cooperation, Macro-regions and North-West Europe. During his professional activity, he held several academic positions as associate professor in Padua (as Jean Monnet chair), Milan (Bocconi university) and currently in the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) where he teaches a master course on European Integration and Regional Development.
Plenary 2 – EU Cohesion Policy with Reflection on Third Country Liaisons
Prof. Philip McCann, The University of Groningen Endowed Chair of Economic Geography, The Netherlands
Special Adviser to Corina Creţu, the European Commissioner for Regional Policy, 2015-2016
Special Adviser to Johannes Hahn, the European Commissioner for Regional Policy, 2010-2013.
Chief Independent Economic Advisor, 2013-2014, EU Sixth Cohesion Report
Philip McCann holds The University of Groningen Endowed Chair of Economic Geography and is one of the most highly cited spatial economists and economic geographers of his generation. He has won academic awards for his research in several countries, and has been an invited keynote speaker in over one hundred and fifty conferences in thirty countries. He is currently Co-Editor of Spatial Economic Analysis and Review of Urban and Regional Development Studies, and Editor of the Edward Elgar Book Series New Horizons in Regional Science. As well as the European Commission, Philip also advises various directorates within the OECD, the European Investment Bank, and various government departments and commissions in several countries.
Plenary 3 – Immigration, Migration and Refugees
Prof. Jenny Phillimore, Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS), University of Birmingham, UK
Title of the presentation: Refugee integration in times of crisis
Jenny Phillimore is Professor of Migration and Superdiversity and the inaugural Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity in the College of Social Sciences, the University of Birmingham. She has lead many major projects looking at migrant integration and settlement and superdiversity and welfare delivery focusing on refugee integration, and migrants’ access to health and housing. She headed the Making a Difference Joseph Rowntree Foundation project, which explored the ways in which RCOs used evidence to influence policy. Jenny has acted as an adviser for local, regional, national and European Government on new migration, integration, employability and housing. Jenny currently leads the Norface/ESRC funded Understanding Welfare Bricolage in Superdiverse Neighbourhoods (UPWEB) project which examines access to healthcare in four European countries with different welfare and immigration regimes. Her work is published in a wide range of journals including Social Sciences and Medicine, Journal of Social Policy, BMC International Health and Human Rights, Urban Studies, Community Development, Sociology, Critical Social Policy and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Recent books include New Migrants in the UK, Community Research for Community Participation and Migration and Social Policy (2016) with texts in preparation entitled Delivering welfare in an era of superdiversity, Race, Class and Conflict: fifty years on, Getting below the radar: understanding community groups and activities in the UK, and Negotiating Superdiversity: From the micro-level to the nation state. Jenny is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Plenary 3 – Immigration, Migration and Refugees
Dr. Martin Kahanec, Associate Professor at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary
Title of the presentation: The myths and realities of the European migration challenge
Associate Professor at the Central European University in Budapest. Visiting Research Fellow, Deputy Program Director “Migration”, the leader of the research sub-area EU Enlargement and the Labor Markets and former Deputy Director of Research (2009) at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. Co-Founder and Scientific Director of CELSI, Bratislava. Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program. Research affiliate at the Faculty of National Economy, University of Economics in Bratislava.
Member of several professional associations and a founding member, vice-President, and Fellow of the Slovak Economic Association.
Kahanec’s main research interests are labor and population economics, ethnicity, migration, and reforms in Central Eastern European labor markets. He has published in peer-reviewed academic journals, contributed chapters in collected volumes including the Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality (OxfordUP) and the International Handbook on the Economics of Migration (Edward Elgar), and he has edited several scientific book volumes and journal special issues.
He is the Managing Editor of the IZA Journal of European Labor Studies and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Manpower.
Martin Kahanec has held several advisory positions and leading roles in a number of scientific and policy projects with the World Bank, the European Commission, European Parliament, and other international and national institutions.
Plenary 3 – Immigration, Migration and Refugees
Dr. Erka Çaro, University of Jyväskylä, Finland – Early Career Plenary Speaker
Title of the presentation: Challenges of the New Migration in Western Balkans
Dr. Erka Çaro is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland and University of Tirana, Albania. She received her Master Degree and PhD in Population Studies from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 2006 and 2011 respectively. Since then until 2013 she worked as a post-doc on the ERC grant project “Transnational Work and the Evolution of Sovereignty”. She is now the Principal Investigator and coordinator of the Regional Research Promotion Program funded project ‘Industrial Citizenship and Labor Migration from Western Balkan, Cases of Albania and Kosovo migration to Germany, Switzerland and Greece’, and is currently also engaged with the Academy of Academy of Finland funded project “Industrial Citizenship and Labour Mobility in the EU: a Migrant Centered Study of Estonia-Finland and Albania-Italy Labour Mobility”, coordinating the Albania – Italy case. She has a strong publication record for an early career researcher, with sole-authored articles in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Regional Insights, co-authored article in Gender, Place and Culture, Population Place and Space, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Her research interests include areas such as migration, demography, trade union relationships with migrants, labor mobility, labor and migration politics, gender studies, human and political geography, Western Balkans, Southern Europe.
Plenary 4 – Building bridges – macroregional perspectives
Prof. Ewald Engelen, University of Amsterdam
Ewald Engelen was trained as a social and political philospher. He received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2000 on a thesis about democratic corporate governance. Since then he has held a number of fixed term research positions, both at the University of Amsterdam and elsewhere. In 2005 he received a prestigious grant to investigate the fate of the Amsterdam International Financial Center in a rapidly changing landscape of digitalizing and internationalizing finance. In 2009 he was appointed as Professor of Financial Geography at the Department of Human and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. Engelens main research interests are in comparative institutionalism, comparative capitalism, europeanization, financialization before and after the crisis, post-democracy, elite politics and elite story telling. In 2010 Engelen joined a Manchester-based academic collective, which authored the much-acclaimed After the Great Complacence that covered the Great Financial and the timid political response in the EU, the UK and the US. Engelen doubles as a public critic of financialization, neoliberalism and the European crisis response.
Plenary 4 – Building bridges – macroregional perspectives
Dr. Wolfgang Schüssel, Former Federal Chancellor of Austria (2000 -2007), Austria
Wolfgang Schüssel was born in Vienna in 1945 and received his doctorate in law from Vienna University in 1968. Between 2000 and 2007 Mr Schüssel served as Federal Chancellor of Austria, chairing the European Council during Austria‘s EU Presidency in the first half of 2006.
His term in office saw the introduction of the Euro, a comprehensive reform of Austria’s pension system, the consolidation of the country‘s budget, the privatization of nationalized industries, as well as restitution payments to the victims of National Socialism.
From 1995 to 2007 Mr Schüssel was National Chairman of the Austrian People‘s Party. From 1989 to 1995 he served as Minister of Economic Affairs, and from 1995 to 1999 as Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs. Mr Schüssel played a key role in Austria’s accession to the European Union and during the country‘s first Presidency of the EU Council.
Since 2008 Wolfgang Schüssel has been an active President of the Foreign Policy and United Nations Association. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Bertelsmann Foundation and on the Supervisory Board of RWE AG.
Mr Schüssel is a member of the Scientific Committee of The European House Ambrosetti and of the Board of Trustees of the Allensbach Institute, President of United Europe and, since October 2015, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
Wolfgang Schüssel is a renowned speaker on the subjects of Europe and European integration, international energy policy and economic development, as well as transatlantic relations and relations between Europe and Russia.
After Gala Dinner Speech
Mag. Hubert Patterer
Mag. Hubert Patterer was born in Villach, Austria, on June 2nd, 1962. He started working for the newspaper Kleine Zeitung Klagenfurt one year before completing his studies of German studies, anglistics, and Philosophy in 1985 at the University of Klagenfurt. In 1997, he was named vice editor in chief of Kleine Zeitung Klagenfurt and attained the same position in Graz in 2000. On April 1st of 2006 he was appointed Editor in Chief of the Kleine Zeitung, the largest regional newspaper of Austria, which is also the daily newspaper with the second widest-circulation in the country. In 2012, he received the title of “Editor in Chief of the Year” of Austria.