Enabling the City: Learning for Transformational Change

Turning globally conceived agendas local means enabling interconnected and sustainable urban knowledge, and giving voice and legitimacy to a multiplicity of agencies, worldviews, ways of knowing and understanding the problems and the possibility for alternative ways of doing things. In this chapter, the authors reflected on the interconnections between these three policy arenas through the lens of the inter-and transdisciplinary experiments at the local level. They highlighted the strong link between the concept of learning and re-learning how to design and plan cities in a holistic manner, and collaborative and participatory processes entailing inter-and transdisciplinarity. To address the combination of resistance, limited capabilities and inevitable contradictions, inter-and transdisciplinary experiments – the framework as well as the INTREPID journey – call for new educational models and a reprioritising of the kind of knowledge that needs to be taught, away from technical skills towards softer competences and dispositions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

INTREPID Futures Initiative: The future of Academia and trans-disciplinary knowledge production in the urban field. 6th INTREPID Report

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

9th INTREPID REPORT INTREPID FUTURE INITIATIVES: Re-imagine urban curricula (a needs assessment)

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Creative ‘NanoTown’: Framing Sustainable Development Scenarios with Local People in Calabria

This chapter intends to be both scientifically sound and narratively engaging, given the richness of the work done in Gagliato as experienced by the authors. As a matter of fact, besides the research done remotely, the authors gathered in Gagliato in July 2017 for a one-week participatory design workshop, getting to know the local context, talking with local people, materialising the focus groups implemented on site in future visions of sustainable development. Gagliato is a hilly town located in the province of Catanzaro in Calabria, overlooking the Ionian Sea. The chapter introduces a theoretical section regarding current debates on transdisciplinary research and the reason why Gagliato has been considered a suitable case to test it. The enabling conditions and potential barriers to achieve meaningful transdisciplinary outcomes and consequently tangible positive urban transformation of the experience of Gagliato will be discussed in relationship to the various phases of the project.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

INTREPID Futures Initiative: Universities and Knowledge for Sustainable Urban Futures: as if inter and transdisciplinarity mattered

Introduction Background to this Workshop This Workshop is organised as part of an EU-funded Network (COST Action)1: INTREPID – whose objective is to inspire change in how we understand knowledge and build leadership for interdisciplinarity http://www.intrepid-cost.eu/. INTREPID addresses 3 challenges: • Challenge 1 – Understand Change: Reflecting and Learning • Challenge 2 – Critical Mass: Building Networks and Cooperation • Challenge 3 – Enable Change: Enabling interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. It has been exploring the discourse and practice of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity (ID and TD)2 in research policy, programming and funding in the EU and its member states, and has been looking specifically into the obstacles to, and enablers of, ID and TD in urbanrelated research. This Network is funded for four years. We are now entering the last two and, one of the next tasks is to reflect on “The Future of Academia and Universities: as if ID and TD mattered” (INTREPID Futures Initiative). The idea is to make a contribution over the next two years, towards shaping the space and terms of knowledge production in a way that enables more sustainable urban futures. Thus, we will engage with the future of academia and universities from the perspective of urban studies and urban-related research. Aim of the London Workshop This London Workshop is meant to advance the agenda of “Universities and Knowledge for Sustainable Urban Futures: as if ID and TD mattered”, by helping us to define the scope of our contribution, and of the activities we might fund for 2017-2019. Intention statement: ‘To contribute to the shaping of tomorrow’s universities & their urban curricula: as if inter and transdisciplinary ways of knowing actually mattered’. For this purpose, the Workshop was a one-day gathering of experts and practitioners with diverse experience and disciplinary backgrounds.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Reframing China’s heritage conservation discourse. Learning by testing civic engagement tools in a historic rural village

Urban heritage conservation in China has been subject to severe criticism, although there is now a sense of paradigm shift. Charters, declarations and agendas had the merit of filtering down the international discourse on heritage, while more innovative approaches were arising. The UNESCO Historic Urban Landscape recommendation, offers a new angle from which to observe this process of change. The underlying argument of this article is that HUL can provide a platform to achieve greater sustainability in transforming historic sites in China, particularly in rural areas, overcoming, at the same time, the easy shortcut of the East–West discourse of difference in respect to heritage conservation. This is primarily due to the shifting focus from the materiality of heritage to its role in sustainable development with increasing attention on the role played by local communities. By presenting the proposal for the protection of the historic rural village of Shuang Wan in the Jiangsu Province, this paper aims to reflect on this shift showing its advantages but also some of the risks. These are inherent in a discourse of heritage in danger of legitimising mere pro-growth development approaches, if not accompanied by participatory practices considerate of the specific social reality of China

Is the incipient Chinese civil society playing a role in regenerating historic urban areas? Evidence from Nanjing, Suzhou and Shanghai

Urban regeneration in Western countries can count on a long-lasting tradition of experiences in which civil society has played a fundamental role in counterbalancing the system of power, resulting in profound urban governance readjustments. This has been the result of the increasing centrality of horizontal alliances between citizens and associations involved in urban affairs since the late 1960s in the West. Similar theoretical frameworks have been applied in China. However, these have frequently resulted in conceptual shortcuts that depict civil society as immature or lacking and the state as authoritarian. This paper will explore whether these categories are still entirely valid to urban regeneration in China. While the regime has traditionally prevented horizontal linkages of associations in urban governance (supporting their vertical integration to ensure a certain degree of soft control), there are signs of change. In particular, three cases of urban regeneration in historic areas will be used to discuss the changing role played by civil society in China. The ultimate goal is to examine whether horizontal linkages across groups of heterogeneous citizens are arising at the micro-level of urban governance

Search for a light pseudoscalar Higgs boson produced in association with bottom quarks in pp collisions at root s=8 TeV

Peer reviewe

CMS physics technical design report : Addendum on high density QCD with heavy ions

Peer reviewe

Search for heavy resonances decaying to two Higgs bosons in final states containing four b quarks

A search is presented for narrow heavy resonances X decaying into pairs of Higgs bosons (H) in proton-proton collisions collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC at root s = 8 TeV. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb(-1). The search considers HH resonances with masses between 1 and 3 TeV, having final states of two b quark pairs. Each Higgs boson is produced with large momentum, and the hadronization products of the pair of b quarks can usually be reconstructed as single large jets. The background from multijet and t (t) over bar events is significantly reduced by applying requirements related to the flavor of the jet, its mass, and its substructure. The signal would be identified as a peak on top of the dijet invariant mass spectrum of the remaining background events. No evidence is observed for such a signal. Upper limits obtained at 95 confidence level for the product of the production cross section and branching fraction sigma(gg -> X) B(X -> HH -> b (b) over barb (b) over bar) range from 10 to 1.5 fb for the mass of X from 1.15 to 2.0 TeV, significantly extending previous searches. For a warped extra dimension theory with amass scale Lambda(R) = 1 TeV, the data exclude radion scalar masses between 1.15 and 1.55 TeV