Vision and Aims
Our mission is that Centre for the Future of Places, aside from becoming an International Hub for Research on Public Space & Beyond, doing studies on the subject from a global perspective, also becomes a clearing house for ideas and new proposals on how the cities should be planned, designed, and retrofitted best to meet both today’s and tomorrow’s challenges with the focus on public places and urban spaces.
The Centre for the Future of Places has been established to promote sustainable urban development by shifting the urban discourse from objects to places in order to promote healthy and livable cities, within the disciplines of Urban Planning and Urban Design. We envision a networked community of leaders actively working across sectors, frontiers, and disciplines to build a more just, sustainable, and prosperous world.
The task of the Centre is to take a holistic approach in defining, classifying and establishing the public space as an independent academic research field. This means that the center will systematically link together knowledge from all disciplines related to the field of public space, such as urban planning, urban design, environmental psychology, urban sociology, architecture, urban economics, human geography and others.
The focus on public space will serve as a cross-disciplinary framework to merge the knowledge from the different disciplinary silos; thus creating links between the experts within them, to create a holistic understanding of the city that serves as the basis for practical and effective action, which will require extensive international cooperation.
Aims and Objectives
During the next years the centre hopes to produce the following:
- Research, production and dissemination of scientific papers and books
- Development of research proposals and application for research grants
- Production of white papers (policy-research oriented reports)
- Commission of specialized research in four units of the centre
- Collection of knowledge (meta-analysis, cataloguing and systematizing )
- Development of metrics – Tools for analysis of public space
- Organization of round tables, colloquiums and conferences