The 2020 Annual National Conference on Urban Planning takes places on 17th November. The First Keynote Speaker of the Opening and Plenary Session is Roger Keil, professor of York University, Canada. The Second Keynote Speaker is Zoltán Erő, the Chief Municipality architect of Budapest. The Keynote Speeches are followed by a Roundtable Discussion with the two Keynote Speakers, Géza Salamin, president of Hungarian Society for Urban Planning and Gábor Balás, board member, Hungarian Society for Urban Planning. The discussion is moderated by Janos B. Kocsis, vice-president of Hungarian Society for Urban Planning.

Urban Development and Pandemic

Towns and cities have historically faced tremendous challenges as consequences of various pandemics. Foci of economic, scientific and social activities with a delicate fabric of various interlinked functions and deeds immensely susceptible to disruption, they also form hotbeds of the rapid spread of diseases and infections. Originating from dense urban areas, such epidemics have had wide extensive and prolonged impact on the societies and countries, often fundamentally changing the trajectories and power constellations within, and among, nations..

Present COVID epidemic is the uppermost challenge of such sort in the last hundred years that urban areas, as well as countries, have to face. Whilst still in the middle of the pandemic, we have identified key points and lessons in terms of urban development that will give assistance to the economic and social recovery on the one hand and means and measures to prevent further large-scale disruptions.

Schedule

15:00-16:10 Opening and Plenary Session

15:00-15:10 Opening remarks, Géza Salamin, President, Hungarian Society for Urban Planning

15:10-16:10 Keynote presentations

Keynote speakers:

Roger Keil, Professor, Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change, York University, Canada: “After the pandemic is before the pandemic: Urban research and planning in times of risk and uncertainty”

Zoltán Erő, Budapest Chief Municipality Architect: “Process Control on Urban Level – Budapest 2020 Spring”

16:15 – 17:15 Roundtable discussion with

• Roger Keil
• Zoltán Erő
• Géza Salamin, president of Hungarian Society for Urban Planning
• Gábor Balás, board member, Hungarian Society for Urban Planning

Moderated by János B. Kocsis (vice-president of Hungarian Society for Urban Planning)

Roger Keil is a Professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Suburban Planet (Polity 2018), co-editor, with Judy Branfman of Public Los Angeles: A Private City’s Activist Futures (UGAPress 2020), with Xuefei Ren, of The Globalizing Cities Reader (Routledge 2017) and with K. Murat Güney and Murat Üçoğlu of Massive Suburbanization (UTP 2019). Keil currently works at the intersection of global urbanization and (emerging) infectious disease including research under the leadership of S.Harris Ali on community responses to Ebola Virus Disease in urban West Africa and the DRC. He is doing ongoing comparative work with colleagues locally and internationally on the relationship of the COVID-19 pandemic and cities.

Zoltán Erő:

Architect, urbanist, founder of Palatium Studio Ltd., founding curator of the Centre for Contemporian Architecture. His works include those of preservation of architectural heritage and infrastructure construction, as well. Besides taking part in urban planning and public space development projects, he works for years on the revitalization of historic towns, public spaces and buildings. He worked for the Urban Renewal Porgramme and the Development Concept for Budapest around 2000. As a general architect for Budapest Underground Line 4, he was the leader of architects, he was responsible for the architectural conception of the whole line, and was also architect in charge for four stations. He often gives lectures and his publications are known.