During the Baltic Urban Lab project a series of webinars is being organised. The second webinar's keynote speaker is Martin Westin. His introductory presentation's working title is Power and Conflict in Planning - Practical approaches to wicked problems.

“Many of today´s societal challenges can be understood as wicked problems, i.e. problems that are contested, complex and ill-defined. To approach such problems planners need to involve a multitude of stakeholders and deal with power and conflict. This presentation shares experiences from facilitating over twenty multi-stakeholder collaborations in Southern Africa, South-East Asia and Europe. Running through the practice accounts is the metaphor of planning practice as a balancing act between: method and intuition; process and product; opening up and closing down and enabling and challenging. By knitting together practical experiences with theoretical perspectives this presentation aims to provide insights into the complexities and dilemmas of planning practice.”

Martin Westin is employed by SWEDESD at Uppsala University and works as a facilitator for collaborative planning processes in Sweden and internationally. He is interested in collaboration and learning related to complex and contested societal challenges, the so called wicked problems.

The webinar will take place at 12:00-14:00 CET (Central European Time Zone) / 13:00-15:00 EET (Eastern European Time Zone).  

The webinar is open to everybody interested. Registration and more information!

Baltic Urban Lab project, funded by the Central Baltic programme, focuses on developing and testing new integrated planning and Public-Private-People partnership models for the regeneration of four brownfield sites Norrköping, Tallinn, Turku and Riga.