RP Represented TU Dortmund University at Placemaking Week Europe 2026 with a Scholarship-Awarded Workshop
The international event connected academics, practitioners, municipalities, design practices, civic and cultural organizations, businesses, and students to exchange ideas and experiences on creating more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable urban environments.
This year’s programme focused on four key themes: Building Belonging, Co-Creation, City Laboratories, and Resilience.
SRP at Placemaking Week Europe
Representing SRP, Negin Amiri initiated and moderated the workshop “Placemaking for Socially Resilient and More-than-Human Friendly Neighborhoods.” The workshop was selected for a scholarship by Placemaking Europe Week 2026 and was among the 46 workshops implemented as part of the event’s 136 sessions.It was developed as a cross-faculty collaboration with Dr. Sahar Javaheri Tehrani from Computational Systems Biology at the Faculty of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering at TU Dortmund University.
Through this workshop TU team brought together 18 participants from diverse backgrounds, including academics, practitioners, representatives of urban planning companies and municipalities, and students. It explored how placemaking can contribute to the development of socially resilient and more-than-human-friendly public spaces through inclusive, experimental, and nature-sensitive design processes.
A particular focus was placed on the early stages of planning and design, considering public spaces as platforms for testing new ideas, practices, and forms of social innovation. Participants discussed how relationships between communities and nature can be strengthened through more inclusive approaches to the design and development of urban spaces.
A Tranformative Placemaking Perspective
A central theme of the workshop was to explore how civil society initiatives, neighborhood planning practices, and practice-based knowledge , have been explored through the Erasmus+ Cooperation Project “Urban Planning for Social Resilience in Urban Neighborhoods: Transformative Change through Civic Engagement (UPRUN)” in SRP between 2023-2026 ,can be brought into dialogue with emerging nature-based and more-than-human perspectives in urban planning.
The workshop examined how these two perspectives can create synergies within placemaking processes and contribute to the development of more resilient neighborhoods. By connecting civic engagement and community-based approaches with nature-inclusive planning, participants discussed new ways of understanding resilience not only as a social process, but also as one that involves relationships between people, urban nature, and other living beings.
The workshop also highlighted the potential of cross-faculty collaboration to generate new questions, connect different forms of knowledge, and develop innovative approaches to the cities and neighbourhoods of the future.