Events
The calendar below shows an overview of events and conferences that we have organized or participated in.
The MobileWorlds Workshops have taken place throughout 2024, in both Bergen and Porto. They are interactive workshops in which we explore how arts, and drawing maps, can help various individuals – children as well as adults – to connect to third cultures within them and surrounding them, and the potential this might have for creating new points for encounter with ‘others’ – other people, other ideas, other practices, concerning sustainable mobility and beyond. We have customized workshops per audience group (e.g. all-ages, families, planners, academics/conference). You can find out how to do your own Workshop here.
The Mobile Worlds workshops take a hands-on, creative approach to explore mobility practices through the lens of culture – based on a set of norms and values that we identify with, for instance based on nationality, region, or subgroup (e.g. environmentalist, academic, skater, etc.). They begin with an introspective, individual part (which can remain private), and then move on to group creations and discussions about various cultures coming together within individuals and between individuals and groups. The workshop uses drawing, collage, plasticine-shaping, and other such methods to stimulate out-of-the-box engagement with the topic. The workshops are adjusted for diverse audiences.
The Festival took place in September and October 2025 in Bergen, Online, and in Porto. The Festival is a platform for bringing together a broad MobileWorlds community, connecting arts and planning perspectives for a broad audience, showing the potential of what the MobileWorlds project has only begun to explore. Details on the Festival specifically are found here and tools for organizing your own MobileWorlds Festival can be found here.
The key events of the MobileWorlds project have now ended. You can find details about the past activities by browsing the past events below.
- This event has passed.
Webinar: Questioning (Mental) Comfort in Planning
This event is part of a series of “Planning Dialogues” exploring “change” in planning. This event will be a debate on how the ideal of comfort affects the realm of thinking, how much this has to do with physical comfort, and how much it affects a willingness to change, or not to chane – both outside and inside our minds. Is there a tendency to stay in our comfort zones even when thinking? We explore this, as usual, within the field of planning – a field that in this case has some power to determine the extent to which it makes comfort a priority, or not.
For the debate, we have invited:
Wendy Tan, Associate Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences, at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen, Norway, and Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Landscape Architecture and Planning chair at Wageningen University, The Nethlerands, brings a decade of experience as an architect, urban designer, researcher and planner in Europe and Asia to the discussion. + info: Wendy’s HVL profile
António Ferreira, Associate Research Professor at CITTA – Centre for Research on Territory, Transports and Environment of the University of Porto, Portugal. António has worked in a number of countries and universities across Europe. He is an eclectic and versatile researcher with great curiosity for new topics and who has published on a variety of fields, ranging from urban and transport governance to planning education, from emotions in the workplace to mindfulness, from planning theory to economic appraisal. At the moment, his key research interests are focused on child-friendly futures and post-growth planning, the governance of the digital transition and of “smart” cities. António is also a Yoga and Meditation teacher and Personal Trainer and actively uses insights from these embodied disciplines to inspire his work. + info: António’s CITTA profile
John Sturzaker, Ebenezer Howard Chair of Planning at the University of Hertfordshire in April 2021. He is the Programme Leader for the MSc in Sustainable Planning. John has had a varied career as a planner in both practice and academia, and is keen to bring both areas closer together. He tries to work across disciplinary boundaries, with the ultimate aim of improving people’s lives by contributing to planning and development policy and practice. He is particularly interested in how cities grow in more “sustainable” ways, with an understanding of sustainability that considers all those involved, including those with less power and influence in the planning and development systems. + info: John’s University of Hertfordshire profile
Sofia Wiberg, a researcher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. She is interested in knowledge formation, collective work and decision making processes, asymmetric power relations and the limits of knowing. She has conducted research on transdisciplinary approaches to planning, including the arts, and how these are used during co-creation. + info: Sofia’s KTH profile
The event is organised by:
Susa Eräranta is a Professor of Practice at Aalto University, Finland, and works simultaneously in practice. She has a background in urban planning, sustainability and organizational sciences. Her research interests are in exploring the complex dynamics of diverse living beings in the practices, processes and networks of planning. + info: LinkedIn
and
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld, MSCA-post-doctoral research fellow at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL), in Bergen, Norway, and collaborating member of the Centre for Research on Transport, Territory and Environment at the University of Porto. Her research interests include Planning, Governance, Sustainability, Mobility, and Public Space, especially with an international perspective. She is especially interested in links to socio-economic history, development and philosophy, in the search for socially as well as economically sustainable worldwide change (see e.g. ‘degrowth’). In doing so, she attempts to create interaction between academic and artistic worlds (e.g. film, literature and photography, among others). + info: LinkedIn
Please sign up via Eventbrite. If the event is fully booked when you try to book it, please contact Kim via: kimvs@hvl.