KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Who we are
The Swedish research team is led by Dr Meike Schalk (Associate Professor) and Emilio Brandao (PhD candidate) from the research group Urban Design and Urban Theory at KTH School of Architecture.
In the CoNECT project we act as co-leader of the WP3: CoNECT Labs.
To read more about us, visit our website here.
Our role in the project
KTH-A contributes to mapping practices and places of community resilience at the local and regional levels in Sweden. It will conduct ethnographic field studies in specific neighbourhoods and set up the Swedish CoNECT Lab with the particular focus on a translocal model of community pedagogies for resilience, that can be reproduced/appropriated in different contexts. The team will also develop innovative communication and dissemination strategies together with the cooperation partner ArkDes – the national Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design.
We have collaborated with AAA on several occasions and over many years. This project and the broad resilience knowledge base that the CoNECT network gathers gives us the unique opportunity to put ideas to the test locally, and also translocally, with support of the partners from a wide range of specific fields, and assess them critically within a larger team and multiple perspectives.
What ‘resilience’ means to us
We consider resilience as a practice strongly associated with the building of communities. We see it also as an undisciplined practice unsettling affirmative narratives; a post-disciplinary endeavour critical to the dominance of technocratic expert-driven knowledge – as we all need to take part in the transformation, and perhaps disobedient to traditional forms of constructing knowledge. Therefore, we are interested in the ways that communities define resilience on their own terms and through their everyday practices which we see as a matter for mutual learning.
The dissemination and cross-learning at multiple localities in Europe require a structured and accessible way of sharing knowledge on existing practices, places and experiences. The platform intends to create this in the form of a network of networks. We believe that this platform has the capacity to inspire new and existing initiatives globally. We also hope that it will create opportunities for a critical appropriation and transformation of the platform by its users to serve and inspire others even further.