The first Hub4 Council Meeting as part of CIVIS 2.0 took place at PLUS from the 1st to the 3rd of February as part of an interdisciplinary and intercultural programme.

The meeting was organised by the scientific co-leaders of the Hub, Prof Stefan Lang and Prof Kyoko Shinozaki, with the support of Hub4 Coordinator Rozsa Magasföldi and Open Labs Coordinator Maximilian Grund. The participants from the CIVIS partner universities were offered a multi-layered programme that illuminated many facets of the city of Salzburg, famous for its festival and world cultural heritage. Hub 4 generally deals with topics such as urban planning, urban mobility and migration. In addition to the project-related exchange on Hub activities and quality indicators, the main topics of the meeting were the scientific discourse in the field of participatory methods in urban design and the challenges of sustainable tourism. For the latter, Prof Martin Knoll and Hon-Prof Kurt Luger were able to provide interesting insights in historical and current dimensions. Research groups from geoinformatics and sociology set impressive accents in their interdisciplinary activities, from the creative setting of the iDEAS:lab as a CIVIS Open Lab to socially relevant topics such as urban health & e-health, urban emotions & mobility, tourism & housing, soil sealing & urban woodlands & green spaces. A screening of the multi-award-winning documentary film “Unten” by and with Đorđe Čenić, a guided tour of the city by the Apropos Association and an exclusive tour of the Festival Halls rounded off the intensive 2-day programme, which was deliberately designed to be rich in contrasts.

Project information

“CIVIS – Europe’s Civic University Alliance” is a university alliance or “European University” consisting of 11 universities, in which the PLUS is also a member. It implements the “European Universities Initiative” of the European Union, which aims to create a uniform European higher education area.

There are five so-called hubs in which teams work on content. CIVIS Hubs are cross-thematic and interdisciplinary research and education areas that will shape our European University. The aim is to create innovative study and research programmes that focus on global societal challenges.