The international conference of Territorial Intelligence and its prospects

By Mihai PASCARU, Universitatea Alba Iulia, Romania

Slides of the presentation

Main objective

Main objective of the annual international conference of territorial intelligence is gathering all the European network members with other researches and territorial actors in order to exchange the information about the year, have debates on progress an prospects. It guarantee the transparence of the project through common decision-makings. Each activity is invited to make a balance of its work of the year and to enlarge its thinking state and to debate with the whole consortium members.

Organisation

Initial organization instituted a Scientific Committee and an Organisational Committee.
The Scientific Committee is representative of the whole network, it drafted the calls for proposals and reviewed the proposals of paper and the papers.
The Organisational Committee coordinated the conferences organisation with a local committee for each conference in order harmonize conferences supported by caENTI.

Workpackage 2 “Conference” progress towards objectives

During caENTI, three international conferences on territorial intelligence were organised with caENTI support in:

• Alba Iulia, organised by the University “1 Decembrie 1918” of Alba Iulia, from September 20th to 23th 2006 on the topic "Region, identity and sustainable development"
• Huelva, organized by the University of Huelva, from October, the 24th to the 26th 2007 on the topic "Territorial Intelligence and Governance Participative research-Action applied to territorial development"
• Besançon, organized by the University of Franche-Comté, from October, the 15th to the 17th 2008 on the topic "Tools and methods of Territorial Intelligence" according to the caENTI objective.

Alba Iulia 2006 conference

The three topics proposed for debate within the Alba Iulia 2006 conference were:

1. Is region the most appropriate space to think sustainable development?
2. Construction of regional identity. Problems, experiences, best practices.
3. Methods and generic tools to study and govern sustainable territorial development.

The debates on the three major topics of the caENTI conference reunited researchers affiliated with the caENTI project, as well as other territorial actors and scientists not affiliated with the University teams involved in the project. More than 30 scientific papers were presented.

Huelva 2007 conference

Three thinking and debates themes were presented:

1. The participative research-action applied to sustainable territorial development.
2. The application of the methods and tools of the participative research-action to the territorial sustainable development.
3. The analysis of the research-action experiences applied to the territorial projects diagnosis, planning, management and evaluation.

The Huelva 2007 conference was mainly organized by the Universidad de Huelva and received 130 participants from 11 countries, with 50 communications and 104 authors.

Besançon 2008 conference

The sixth international conference of Territorial Intelligence took place in Besançon (France) on October, 16th and17th 2008.
Its general theme was “Tools and methods of Territorial Intelligence”.

The call for papers, published on January, 31st 2008, suggested three themes:

1. The tools of territorial intelligence for and by actors of sustainable development.
2. The scientific methods and the generic tools of spatial observation and of territorial information analysis.
3. The evolution of the territorial intelligence concept. The scientific committee reviewed and selected 148 communications over 182 proposals.

The scientific event mobilised 248 participants of 22 nationalities, and among the 218 European participants there were 124 French people. 29 researchers were from North and South America, Asia and Africa.

The prospects of workpackage 2 “Conference”

The prospects of work package 2 after caENTI are:

• The drafting of an external scientific committee of the European Network of Territorial Intelligence.
• The organisation of the next international conference of territorial intelligence in SALERNO (Italy) “Territorial intelligence and culture of development” on November, 4th to 6th 2009.