"You three should meet."
The inception of Urban Trialogue happened soon after we got introduced to each other by our supervisor in common Sabine Knierbein. Namely, after receiving a short message from her saying "you three should meet", we ended up in an online talk encountering each other for the very first time. The more we talked the more we realised how complementary our professional experiences are and how strongly our positionalities overlap with each other.
We have concluded this very first talk with a strong commitment to nourishing this exceptional encounter. We parted away with a promise that we will make something out of it. And almost instantly after the talk we came accross and decided to respond to the open call for abstracts for the TRIALOG conference in Stuttgart dealing with co-production of knowledge in urban development (link: https://international-urbanism.de/news/trialog-conference-whose-knowledge-counts-the-meaning-of-co-productive-processes-for-urban-development-and-urban-research/).
Our participatory action experiences
We have realised that our past experiences from three different geo-political contexts (Brasil, Serbia, and Turkey) fit—complement each other—very well and somehow organically we started building up bridges in between them. Our aim was simple - to reflect upon our participatory action experiences and draw conclusions on how to improve them in the future. As each one of us had a tangible participatory action experience to talk about—a project that s/he worked on—it was easy to exchange. The projects we have talked about were “A Batata Precisa de Você” in São Paulo (http://largodabatata.com.br/a-batata-precisa-de-voce/), "Urban Hub 2" in Belgrade (https://www.sharedcities.eu/material/belgrade-urban-hub-2-launches-skograd/), and “Re-think 100 Yıl” in Ankara (https://www.100yiliyenidendusunmek.org) The result of this first encounter was a short policy recommendation paper that got presented in Stuttgart during the TRIALOG conference in November 2019. Full text is available here (https://www.trialog-journal.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/TRIALOG_Book-of-abstracts.pdf) One can say, ever since that day, the URBAN TRIALOGUE evolves and goes on.