AAAS 2020 Annual Meeting in Seattle

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest multi-disciplinary science society (AAAS Meetings). Its mission is to advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people through a broad array of initiatives focused on communication, public engagement, education, scientific responsibility, public policy, and science diplomacy.

This year, the Association has organised its annual meeting in Seattle (USA). In a highly competitive process, a session proposal submitted by Bernhard Müller about “Socially Integrative Cities – Paving the Way to Urban Sustainability” was accepted by the organisers. The session was held on February 15 in the Conference Center of the fast growing city in the Northwest of the United States.

The session was inspired by the EU-funded project “Transition towards urban sustain-ability through socially integrative cities in the EU and in China” (TRANS-URBAN-EU-CHINA), which is coordinated by TU Dresden. The well attended session was moderated by Bernhard Müller together with Corinna Amting from the European Commission.

Paulina Schiappacasse gave a presentation on “Socially Integrative Cities: From Concept to Policy Implementation”. She presented a comprehensive understanding of what social integration and inclusion means in urban development, and she presented related examples. The presentation was based on conceptual and empirical work within the framework of the TRANS-URBAN-EU-CHINA project. 

Liu Jian, a professor at the renowned Tsinghua University in Beijing, a project partner institution, talked about “Social Integration and Community Planning: Concepts and Practices in Contemporary China”. As she could not attend the conference personally due to the Corona Virus outbreak, she presented her experience via video conference. It was interesting to hear how important social integration in cities and neighbourhood has become in China for coping with the current crisis.

Finally, Gerardo Ardila, a professor from the National University of Colombia in Bogota, a close cooperation partner of the senior professorship at TU Dresden, and former planning secretary of the City of Bogota, presented his view on “Land Policy and the Socially Integrative City: Experience from Latin America”. Based on his academic work and his experience in municipal practice he described how closely interlinked land policy, social integration, climate change adaptation and the provision of infrastructure and services are, and how important a comprehensive approach concerning urban sustainability is. 

Lively discussions were held concerning the concept of the socially integrative city and its implementation. Many questions and answers were related to consequen-ces for the cities in the Northwest of the US and the Southwest of Canada, i.e., Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, which see themselves as forerunners in America on the way to urban sustainability.

On this occasion, the TRANS-URBAN-EU-CHINA project also had the chance to launch its recently published “Policy Brief” in North America. Interesting was the experience to work together with an illustrator, Fiammetta Ghedini, the founder of RIVA Illustrations.