City Resilience Against Climate Change: The Case of Istanbul

UNIC Pop-Up CityLabs

The European University of Post-Industrial Cities – UNIC – is an alliance of eight universities in post-industrial cities which all face similar challenges and opportunities in terms of mobility, inclusion and diversity. To contribute to the urban resilience and renaissance of post-industrial cities, we establish UNIC CityLabs!

As part of UNIC, UNIC Pop-Up CityLabs, are physical and virtual urban meeting places, where UNIC students, researchers and educators meet UNIC’s associate partners, local communities and stakeholders face to face to co-create innovative solutions to real-life societal challenges where they occur.

Within this context, the SECOND KU Pop-Up CityLabs will be organized on September 24^th on the theme of “City Resilience Against Climate Change: The Case of Istanbul” where we will discuss the vulnerability and resilience of Istanbul regarding climate change. Following the discussion, participants will ideate to develop possibilities to enhance the resilience of the city towards climatic events.

Our ambition is to eradicate the strict borders between university and city to develop relevant solutions for pressing issues as well as provide students with a learning experience that is connected to and rooted in the actual challenges experienced in urban contexts. That is why,

You’re invited to be part of it!

The event will take place

on September 24^th, at 15:00-17:00 via Zoom.

When?

September 24th @ 15:00-17:00 (Online)

How to register?

To register, click at the link below: https://kocun.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwpc-6orD4pGtekOGnILaiGQWdQYVTgusLB

Who can join?

• All Koc University students (Bachelors, Masters and PhDs) from all disciplines.
• All Koc University academics
• All Koc University staff can join.

Results:

• You will have networking possibility. Not only do you get a chance to work with students from other majors, you’ll also get a chance to network with academics, researchers, NGO members and city stakeholders
• Remember, by joining the UNIC CityLabs event, you’ll also get a chance to be part of the UNIC alliance network and work with peers across all UNIC universities (Erasmus University Rotterdam; Koç University; Ruhr University of Bochum; University College Cork; University of Deusto; University of Liège; University of Oulu; University of Zagreb)

More info on UNIC, please visit https://unic.eu/

What is UNIC CityLabs Vision?

CityLabs provide learning opportunities by bringing together different knowledge and know-how, creating spaces for knowledge co-production, fostering a dynamic connection between learning and doing, and changing the usual practices around urban sustainability between the government and academia. CityLabs are examples where the urban areas’ local issues can be experimented with knowledge co-production across government, academia, and other knowledge groups to develop new frameworks and know-how, necessary for urban sustainability. On the same line of thoughts, CityLabs are forums exclusively established to co-produce policy-relevant knowledge among relevant knowledge groups in academia and governing bodies. The symbolic notion of a laboratory pinpoints that CityLabs usually constrain their focus to a specific city, issue, or timeframe while exploring and producing different types of know-how to generate meaningful insights. Urban laboratories put together change processes and the necessity of practices and concepts, creating connections for the cities’ future visions to the politics and patterns of a better ‘tomorrow’.

Istanbul CityLab: The Second Local Challenge: Climate Change

UNIC CityLab are designed to work on specific challenges that our post-industrial cities face involving various issues such as urban resilience, climate-friendly cities, development, diversity and inclusion and many more. On yearly basis, every UNIC partnered university pick two challenges and work on these topics both locally and internationally.

For the first Pop-Up CityLabs, Istanbul CityLab focused on diversity and inclusion aspect since cities are on the frontline of efforts to foster the well-being of refugees and migrants.

In this second theme, this time we focus on climate change and resilience aspect of the cities.

Format

The 2-hour workshop will start with brief presentations led by academics and stakeholders on the current challenges of climate change and to what extent Istanbul is resilient towards climatic events. This will be followed by identifying challenges through a process of inductive interactive exchange based on a ‘station model’ across selected sub-topics to identify main challenges via the platform Miro. The language of the workshop will be Turkish.

Information

For more information, contact us at unic@ku.edu.tr or visit https://mirekoc.ku.edu.tr

For the Program, please click here.