Save the Date: IOER Conference 2024 "Space & Transformation: Living in Harmony with Nature"

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated in drastic fashion the inextricable link between human well-being and healthy ecosystems. Today, however, ecosystems and biodiversity around the world are facing considerable societal pressures and are moving dangerously close to critical tipping points: ecosystems and their services are being degraded to such an extent that more than one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. Significant non-renewable natural resources are being overexploited while cascading environmental risks threaten the livelihoods of large sections of the population. For these reasons, transformative change seems more urgent than ever.

This is particularly true with regard to spatial development, insofar as the relationship between humans and nature is negotiated and shaped directly in landscapes, regions, cities and urban districts. So what needs to be achieved in spatial development within the next 10 to 20 years to ensure that humans can permanently live in harmony with nature? How can novel human-nature partnerships and vibrant human-nature relationships be shaped at different spatial scales?  

These questions are at the heart of the IOER Conference 2024. In the run-up to the UN Summit of the Future 2024, we investigate which spatial approaches and methods can help to greatly accelerate the replacement of destructive ways of living and doing business with sustainable ones. In particular, the focus is on perspectives and approaches that can enable and drive such transformative change, such as:

• positive visions of a good life that inspire and motivate individual and collective actors in spatial development
• strategies and tools for transformative governance, planning, innovation and revitalisation
• complex spatial analyses, indicators, models and simulations
• circularity and resilience in building and settlement development
• regeneration of ecosystems and biodiversity as well as nature-based solutions

This urgent need for social, ecological and technical systems, targets and transformation knowledge on spatial development will be addressed at the IOER Conference on 26 and 27 September 2024. Presentations by German and international experts and actors as well as by scientists from all IOER research areas await the participants.

Summer School of DLGS for PhD students on 25 September 2024

In addition, the Dresden Leibniz Graduate School (DLGS) jointly run by the IOER and TUD Dresden University of Technology, is organising its international Summer School for PhD students the day before the conference. It also focuses on the overarching topic "Space & Transformation: Living in Harmony with Nature".

Interested parties are warmly invited to contribute their own work and ideas to the conference discussion (in English or German) as well as at the DLGS Summer School (in English). A detailed call for sessions and contributions in diverse formats will follow shortly.

Link to the conference website
Follow us on Twitter/X: @IOER_conference

Background
The IOER Conference is a place for inter- and transdisciplinary exchange. It addresses its questions to both scientists and practitioners. In addition to IOER staff, important protagonists of national, European, and international transformation and spatial research provide impulses for the IOER Annual Conference.

Contact at the IOER
Professor Dr Wolfgang Wende, Dr Martina Artmann (concept),
Katrin Vogel (organisation)
e-mail: tagungioer@ioer.de