The 24th European Colloquium on Theoretical and Quantitative Geography was held in Tallin (Estonia) at the Öpik Conference center, from September 10th to 14th. Conversation suggested by:
Jenni Partanen, Aalto University (Finland), & Denise Pumain, UMR Géographie-cités, Paris (France)The Colloquium was organised by Professor Jenni Partanen, Professor of spatial Planning at the Department of Build Environment in Aalto University (Finland) and at the Department of Academy of Architecture and Urban Studies, Tallinn University of Technology (Taltech, Estonia).
The city of Tallin has a long history and its architecture reveals the diversity of influences that shaped over centuries its attractive center, in this region of forests and lakes along the North-East extremity of the Baltic Sea. Tallin is said to have becomre a smart city, shifting “from Middle Age to e-governance”. Indeed, the colloquium took place in the “future focused environment” of Ülemiste City, a business park and technical campus close to the airport. 83 participants from 19 countries met there to listen to 3 keynotes and some 76 presentations spread over 21 sessions.
As previously in Braga 2023, individual mobility in geographical space was a major concern, but considerably enriched with indicators extracted from multiple sources of new data. This authorised to mobilize classical methods of statistics, cartography, GIS and graphs at multiple scales of analysis, providing new insights to answer more qualitative questions about the rationales of societal behaviour. Classical and new theories were revisited, as especially the “fifteen minutes city” raising new investigations that challenge classical knowledge about urban morphologies and centrality and provide new information about social inequalities in urban practices and accessibility. It seems that the theory became a normative injonction for urbanism despite contradicting numerous aspects of accumulated urban science!
The colloquium also revisited profitably environmental health studies and documented how new patterns of spatial interactions could emerge thanks to new computational methods handling cross border big data. The observation were expanded at global scales for investigating very large cities of the world as well as the evolving financial networks of multinational firms. This decisive computational turn in geography is also acknowledged in reflexive concern for quantitative scientography, geographical theories and history of geography. A special hommage was dedicated to the memory of Peter Haggett who passed away lately.
The next ECTQG meeting is planned for taking place in Avignon, France, from September 8th to 11th 2027. It will be organised by Didier Josselin and Antoine Peris, with the help of many colleagues from UMR Espace (among which Giovanni Fusco, Cyrille Genre Grandpierre, and Sandra Perez who were present in Tallin).