Our Objectives:
With our transnational project IMAGE, Researching the City: Mapping Imaginaries we have worked together in order to emphasize the need of intercity cooperation especially designed to articulate better understandings ‘from within’ places. Such cooperation is built on a series of meaningful and authentic city cooperation in the past and on the commitment we have felt as institutions, becoming an increasing involved part of our cities and feeling a responsibility for our role in how our places are conceived and represented. In this current IMAGE project of -in alphabetical order- Amsterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon, Paris, and Vienna, we have been especially looking at the distinctive areas in which some of the venues of our universities are located and or especially related. We have realized once again the importance to work towards a more polycentric* and polyphonic* look and representation of our cities, a look that incorporates the diversity and interest of all kinds of knowledge, ideas, visions of life, and perspectives that have been nestled in our surroundings and that are at the same time part and representations of local and global flows.
It is in this way that we have been able to make interesting links of connection between our districts and neighborhoods in the partner cities: Amsterdam -Zuidoost-; Barcelona -el Raval-; Lisbon -Carnide-; Paris
– La Defènse-; Vienna -St. Marx-.
During the two and a half years of partnering and collaborating within this Erasmus + funded project, we have co-developed an array of a so-called ‘intellectual outputs. We have done that within the consortium, with more than 350 students, and together with our city partners. During this time starting from 2020, we have done our best to run the project despite and/ in consideration of all covid restrictions and being very aware of the impact of covid and the sadness of the who having lost beloved ones. We have been insisting on the importance of doing research as the best way of learning to be in places and live a life, with all contradictions and difficulties.
All in all, we have run three collaborative editions of projects within the IMAGE that has enabled students to contribute to this mapping imaginaries of our cities, also, stimulating our collective critical thinking and at the same time creating infrastructure and collaborative managing for higher education institutes (HEI’s) that aims at facilitating an IMAGE ‘Researching the City Mapping imaginaries’ method.
Our Intellectual Outputs
In order to organize and amplify the impact of IMAGE we designed the following so-called Intellectual outputs:
- The Teaching Case
- Teacher Training Materials
- Toolkit
- Calibration Document
- Publications
- Knowledge Hub