All Things Urban

Join us for the fourth online Symposium organized by the Serendipity Society: Serendipity and the City. Cities have been the stage for both serendipity and serendipity lost. While their diversity makes them the ideal places for making discoveries and are therefore known as “serendipity engines”; the modern city has been critiqued for ‘designing out’ the accidental of urban environments. The notion of an urban flaneur is metaphorically used to describe information seeking behavior and renowned urban scholars like Jane Jacobs plea for designing streets to facilitate meeting strangers. The public space is of ever-growing importance. With personalized technologies and customized services, it is considered to be one of the few spaces that still affords diverse and serendipitous encounters. The value of serendipitous encounters in cities is not only acknowledged on an individual level, but also from a macro perspective, as serendipity is considered a main driver in cities’ innovativeness and resilience. Tue 8 Feb. (9 AM - 12 AM, GMT) - Sabrina Sauer, Assistant Professor in Media Studies at University of Groningen, The Netherlands - Lily Higgins, future-oriented designer of experiences and founder of Urban Playwalks Rotterdam (www.interventionbureau.com ) Wed 9 Feb. (9 AM - 12 AM, GMT) Contributions by: - Rumen Rachev, Chris Berthelsen & Alex Bonham, Katamari Kart - A Serious and Hilarious Sub/Urban Game for More Serendipitous, Playful, and Friendly Public Art - Jan Adriaenssens, Tactical urban serendipity - Ian Kennedy, Big and small village serendipitousness Thu 10 Feb. (9.30 AM - 12 AM, GMT) - Alan Penn, Professor in Architectural and Urban Computing at University College London, Founding Director Space Syntax and Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities - Panel on Urban Serendipity, with amongst others Samantha Copeland and Christian Busch Please register by Friday February 4! Links will be sent then to the zoom location. Participants who already registered by sending an email to the organizers, do not have to register again. We will be sending out the Zoom link for the symposium a few days before the event.

The Serendipity Society is comprised of researchers examining the complex phenomenon of serendipity from a variety of disciplinary and organizational perspectives. Given the growing interest among industry and academic institutions in developing spaces for serendipity, our mission is to create and nurture an active network of serendipity researchers, which - supports collaboration among senior and junior scholars, - promotes rigorous interdisciplinary research, - works toward the consolidation of research and development of theory, - creates a platform from which to develop serendipity research as an independent field of study, - provides a resource of expertise on serendipity to which organizations, funders, innovators, and planners can turn.