NEWSLETTER

// April 2015

Welcome to the third newsletter of the OIKONET project, co-financed by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union. This project is creating a platform of collaboration to promote the study of contemporary housing from a multidisciplinary and global perspective by encompassing the multiple dimensions which condition the forms of dwelling in today’s societies (architectural, urban, environmental, economic, cultural and social). Participatory actions and pedagogical and research activities bring together various stakeholders and multiple disciplines.


The most relevant upcoming events are the international workshop in Cottbus in June and the second network conference on Global Dwelling in Bratislava, in September. Results of the project are being presented in international on pedagogic innovation and housing studies. Five learning spaces have been collaboratively designed and implemented by partners during the Winter semester, and some of them continue being active in the Spring semester. The third round of subnetwork meetings took place between December and February. The OIKONET web portal has been upgraded with new environments which facilitate access to the activities and outcomes of the project.


The OIKONET Team.


Second international conference: “Global Dwelling”
The second OIKONET International Conference will take place at the Faculty of Architecture, Slovak Technical University, in Bratislava, on September 24-25th, 2015.

The OIKONET conferences on Global Dwelling started last year with the first conference in Barcelona. The second conference will focus on housing regeneration strategies as mechanisms to improve the existing living conditions in the urban areas around the world. Keynote speeches will be delivered by Becky Tunstam, Professor of Housing Policy at the University of York, UK, and Aseem Inam, Associate Professor of Urbanism at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City, US.

A call for papers and posters will remain open until May 15th. Abstracts will be evaluated by the Scientific Committee members. Up to 12 selected papers will be presented at the conference and published in the proceedings. Abstracts that are not selected will have the opportunity to be presented in the poster session. If you need more information, please write us to info@oikonet.org. A registration form is already available.

The opening of the poster section will take place on Thursday, September 24th, in the evening; Friday 25th will be dedicated to paper presentations and keynote speeches.

Second international workshop: “Growth / Shrinkage”
The second OIKONET International Workshop will take place at Cottbus on June 1-6, 2015, hosted by the Brandenburg University of Technology. This workshop will explore the complementarities of growing and shrinking, two urban development patterns exemplified by the cities of Berlin and Cottbus, respectively. Growth usually suggests development and wealth, but this trend presents also a number of urban challenges: How can a city deal with growth in order to maintain adequate living standards and infrastructural supply for its inhabitants? Shrinkage often stands for decline and decay, but it could also be seen as an opportunity for urban renewal. What are then the opportunities of shrinkage and how can a place be downsized without being destroyed?

The workshop will focus on two cities representing the two sides of the same coin: Berlin, the German capital, with a growing number of inhabitants, with a housing shortage that attracts global investors; and Cottbus, a former industrial city in Eastern Germany, facing a decline of population and economic stagnation.

Around fifty students and twenty-five faculty members from the fifteen schools of architecture and urban planning members of OIKONET are expected to participate. Yet, participation is open to students from other schools providing they have their own funding. If you would like to join the workshop, please contact us at info@oikonet.org.



Conference Papers
A paper describing the work about pedagogic innovation carried out in OIKONET was presented by Leandro Madrazo at the 7th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI), held in Seville (Spain), on the 17th, 18th and 19th of November, 2014.



A paper about the research and pedagogic activities carried out in OIKONET around the theme urban regeneration was presented by Karim Hadjri at the conference that took place at the University of Liverpool, 8th and 9th April 2015. The paper was co-authored by Gábor Csanádi, Adrienne Csizmady, Gergely Olt, Mirjana Devetakovic, Tatjana Mrdjenovic, Viera Joklova, Leandro Madrazo, Elina Krasilnikova and Larisa Kuzina. The presentation took place on the 8th of April during the first session on Housing and Urbanism. The session was well attended with a very positive response to the presented papers leading to a lively and interesting debate. Some questions were raised about the OIKONET presentation concerning the tools and methods used to engage stakeholders in the pedagogic activities.

Some more conference papers documenting the achievements of OIKONET project are under way. The are some already accepted abstracts: “IPI Methodology In Habitat Regeneration Strategies Using OIKONET Platform” (Changing Cities 2; June 22-26 2015 Porto Heli, Greece; by Tatjana Mrdjenovic, Mirjana Devetaković, Viera Joklova and Elina Krasilnikova); “Innovation in Architectural Education – OIKONET Experience” (4th World Conference on Technology and Engineering Education; September 2-5 2015 Bratislava, Slovakia; by Viera Joklová and Henrich Pifko); “Collaborative web-based learning spaces: Introduction to Housing” (HEAd'15 - 1st International Conference on Higher Education Advances; June 24-26 2015, Valencia, Spain; Nadia Charalambous and Carla Sentieri); “Designing and implementing a collaborative learning space to introduce students to housing” (EDULEARN15, the 7th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies; July 6-8 2015 Barcelona, Spain; by Carla Sentieri, Nadia Charalambous and Leandro Madrazo).
Learning Spaces
During the Winter semester 2014/15, five learning spaces designed by OIKONET partners , collaboratively, have been implemented. Each learning space has been dedicated to a theme thus enabling different approaches concerning contemporary housing at a global scale:

Introduction to Housing” introduces first and second year students to some fundamentals of housing design and architecture, led by School of Architecture of Valencia.

Habitat Regeneration Strategies”, focuses on the redevelopment of deprived areas at various scales (housing, neighbourhood, city, metropolitan area) encompassing multiple aspects of city life: physical, social, economical and environmental. It is led by the University of Belgrade and by the Faculty of Architecture, Slovak University of Technology.

Threshold Matters” is dedicated to study the intersection of public and domestic spaces. It is led by KU Leuven.

Housing Systems”, dedicated to the study of the concept of housing system, from design to construction, led by the School of Architecture La Salle.

These learning spaces continue active during the Spring semester. Besides, a new edition of the learning space “Contemporary living patterns” has started. It is dedicated the preparatory activities for the Cottbus workshop and it is coordinated by Université Pierre Mendès-France, from Grenoble.
Subnetwork Meetings
Since the publication of the second issue of the OIKONET Newsletter, there has been a new round of subnetwork meetings.

The third meeting of the subnetwork “Housing Research” took place in Budapest on December 12, 2014, hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). The discussions during the meeting focused on two topics: habitat regeneration strategies and global dwelling. The first topic is also part of the learning activities carried out by partners of the subnetwork “Pedagogical Activities”, who participated in this meeting to foster the interconnectivity between research and pedagogic activities within the network.

On January 30, 2015, the Department of Architecture of Istanbul Technical University hosted the third meeting of the subnetwork “Pedagogical Activities” . Representatives of 14 architecture and planning schools - members of the OIKONET network - participated in this meeting, along with pedagogy designers and evaluation experts.

The city of Bratislava hosted the third meeting of the subnetwork “Community Participation” which took place at ARCHA - Centre for Architecture and Urbanism on February 27, 2015. The meeting was dedicated to discuss the on-going participatory activity in Rimini, and to introduce the project to be carried out in the Bratislava Petržalka district. The purpose of this project is to engage citizens in the Central Development Axis of Petržalka. Eight OIKONET partners participated in this encounter.



The next round of subnetwork meetings will take place in June: the Housing Research group will meet in Rotterdam, hosted by the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies; members of the Pedagogical Activities group will meet in the Brandenburg Technical University in Cottbus with occasion of the second international workshop, and the Community Participation group will gather in Tirana, at the premises of POLIS University.

Upgrade of the OIKONET web portal
An upgrade of the website www.oikonet.org has been recently completed. It includes a new environment –OIKONETWORK– to visualize the relationships about the activities and outcomes produced during the project. The interrelated information that is shown in the visual graph in OIKONETWORK is displayed in the dashboard in the home page. This information system –developed with semantic technologies– has been created for the project of OIKONET by the research group ARC Engineering and Architecture La Salle.

Upcoming events

June 1-6, 2015. Second international OIKONET workshop “Growth/Shrinkage), hosted by the Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany. Students from schools which are not OIKONET members can join the workshop with their own funding. If you are interested, please contact us at info@oikonet.org.

June 5, 2015. The fourth meeting of the subnetwork Housing Research will take place at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies in Rotterdam.

June 9, 2015. The fourth meeting of the subnetwork Community Participation will take place in Tirana hosted by POLIS University.

September 24-25, 2015. The second OIKONET International Conference will take place at the Faculty of Architecture, Slovak Technical University, in Bratislava, on September 24-25th, 2015. Abstracts can be submitted until May 15th. Registration is open.​

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