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Brief report about the 24th ECTQG in Tallin

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).

Brief report from the 23rd ECTQG in Braga

The 23rd European Colloquium on Theoretical and Quantitative Geography (ECTQG) was held in Braga (Portugal) from September 14th to 17th, 2023. Organised by Professor Antonio Antunes and his colleagues from CITTA – the Research Centre for Territory, Transport and Environment of the Universities of Coimbra and Porto (https://citta.fe.up.pt/), the colloquium brought together 109 participants, of which 41 PhD candidates. Conversation suggested by:
Denise Pumain
Laboratoire Géographie-cités, Paris, France
The participants came from 19 different countries (31 from France, 14 from Belgium, 13 from Portugal, 11 from the Netherlands, 7 from Switzerland, 6 from the UK or Italy and 4 from Luxembourg). There were also a few non-European nationals as it is often the case at these conferences, coming from as far as South Africa for the occasion. The chosen location (Vila Galé Collection Braga Hotel) provided the quiet and magnificent environment of an ancient cloister. The average age of participants seemed considerably lower than at previous colloquia, reflecting the interest of young geographers in theoretical and quantitative geography. 101 papers were presented in 4 days, including 4 keynote speeches (by Julie Vallée (Paris, France), Cecilia Silva (Porto, Portugal), Clémentine Cottineau (Delft, Netherlands) and Stan Geertman (Utrecht, Netherlands). Over twenty paper sessions were held, with mobility as the dominant theme, but also spatial inequalities, urban planning, environmental change, new information processing methods and theoretical geography (see the full program here). The proceedings are available online here.

The next ECTQGs are scheduled on September 10th-14th, 2025 in Estonia (organised by Professor Jenni Partanen, Academy of Architecture and Urban Studies, Tallinn University of Technology) and in September 2027 in France (organised by Didier Josselin, UMR Espace, CNRS and University of Avignon). The full story of ECTQGs is available here.