INURA Conference
"Between Big Ideas and Life’s Realities"

Belgrade, Serbia
NO REGISTRATION DEADLINE
• INURA | The International Network for Urban Research and Action 
• think-tank "Ministry of Space"  

INURA 
INURA is a network of people involved in action and research in localities and cities. The Network consists of activists and researchers from community and environmental groups, universities, and local administrations, who wish to share experiences and to participate in common research. The research is closely tied to, and is a product of, local action and initiative.  

INURA CONFERENCES
INURA conferences are a bit different from other conferences. Since the beginning the format is always more or less the same and consists of two parts:
1. The first part, two to four days, is dedicated to the visited city: panels, visits, public events and interventions bring participants closer to problems and situation of the city. Exchange among visitors and local people and groups is the key element. 
2. After the city visit a retreat of three to four days takes place somewhere on the countryside. INURA retreats aim at further exchange and reflection on the city visit, experiences in cities around the world, INURA matters and projects. If you want to present a project (research or action or both) it is possible in the retreat in a rather informal way.

This INURA Conference will be held in Belgrade, Serbia
Conference | 22-25 June,
Retreat on mountain Tara | 26-30 June
 

THE THEME
A city’s development is inseparable from the life of the people inhabiting it and the aspirations to differently arrange that life. Alongside with the micro adjustments of the environment to the personal needs of the citizens, great ideas are born on how to reorganize or improve the entire society. Somewhere thereabout, between (grand) visions of a future society and ordinary life, lie realities of the city – its people, its ideologies, its construction sites, abandoned industries, luxurious buildings, suburbs without infrastructures, new facades and old habits. Today, that gap is a place of both a neoliberal expansion and a variety of resistance practices and social alternatives. A modern city bears witness to the new geopolitical constellations, the expansion of large capital interests, freedom of action, citizens’ association and the attempts to establish more equitable social relations.

The conference Between Big Ideas and Life’s Realities will present Belgrade as an “urban collage”, created through an interplay of large, formal development narratives (from a never embellished capital and a victim of unfinished modernization, to a newly proclaimed commercial center of South-East Europe) and the informal practice of housing development, cultural creativity and social activism. Only in the last 50 years, changes in the paradigm of development went from a socialist, centralized model of management and planning, via the chaotic illegal construction and its legalization, only to end with surrendering to market-driven development rules. Different examples of housing policies and construction, cultural politics and practice and social activism graphically represent the intricate relationship between the formal paradigm and the informal practices.

Belgrade of course is not an isolated example of such urban transformation. The collapse of the socialist system, the accompanying universal mantra about privatization and foreign investments as the only way out, and the politics of creating new identities characterize the entire territory of the former Yugoslavia. At the conference, it will be examined a variety of development cases and some attempts to oppose the dominant paradigm typical to the entire region, and open up a wider debate on possible new development strategies.

APPLICATION
To register to the conference please go to their website to fill in the form. 
If you want to present a project (research or action or both) it is possible in the retreat in a rather informal way. Send a short mail to contact@inura.org with a short description of your contribution.

INFO & CONTACTS 
INURA Belgrade conference website
E-MAIL | contact form on their website
 FACEBOOK | Ministry of Space  
ISSUU | Ministry of Space