Project description

The project addresses a common educational need by means of establishing and developing a cooperation partnership between experts on urban and suburban culture from four research universities from the EU and the US. These partner universities include Palacký University (Czech Republic), University Duisburg-Essen (Germany), University Clermont- Auvergne (France), and San Diego State University (United States). The project reflects the massive development of urban and suburban culture in the EU and the United States as well as the growing diversification of the issues in the area of mobility, growing class and ethnic diversity of urban and suburban communities, inclusion and exclusion issues, commuting challenges, construction of urban and suburban identities in the domestic and public space, and sociocultural challenges of back migration from suburbs to cities in the EU countries and the US. The current state of research and education about the urban and suburban culture suffers from lack of multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective that would link research findings of individual disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences and transfer them into digital education processes. The project surveys the existing research and subsequently provides transdisciplinary synergy of the knowledge about the state of urban and suburban culture in EU countries (the Czech Republic, Germany, France) in comparison to the situation in the United States. Experts from the four partner institutions will share ideas and provide transdisciplinary solutions to the education and communication of the current and future challenges of European and American urban and suburban culture. Team members will draw on their expertise in the fields of history, literary and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, urbanism, ecological sustainability, architecture, art history, social and cultural geography and digital geoinformatics.

The challenges and issues of urban and suburban culture in contemporary EU countries and the US have been the focus of much research, yet researchers so far have worked in isolation, within their individual fields. The project will thus promote knowledge sharing and synergic treatment of the subject of urban and suburban culture in the EU and the US in the courses taught at the partner institutions. The project outputs will thus be transdisciplinary and will provide new knowledge which will be disseminated to the project target university audience and the general public at the four partner universities and beyond. The project outputs will be shared on the transnational level as well (including the international conference and project workshops/webinars which will be open to an international audience via online videconferencing platforms). The intellectual outputs of the project will include articles, lectures, workshops, interviews, interactive maps, a collective monograph, digital interactive teaching materials, an exhibition of the project outcomes that will be in physical and digital format, and a transdisciplinary international conference. The project outputs will be used in teaching, blended mobility, research, and public debate on the subject of sub/urban culture in the selected EU countries as compared to the sub/urban culture in the US. The project outputs will make a significant contribution to the ongoing debate about the challenges of urban and suburban growth in the EU and the US. The outputs will be synergic, re-usable and transferable to a wide range of fields within future education, research, urban planning, and urban policy. The project will improve the diversity of education provided by the partner universities, and will include students and staff with special needs who are part of the project target audience. The project results will be shared at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels.

Contacts

Pavlína Flajšarová, Palacký University, Czech Republic

Florian Freitag, Universitat Duisburg Essen, Germany

Mauricette Fournier, Universite Clermont Auvergne

Becky Nicolaides, Andrew Wiese – San Diego State University

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