Josef Konvitz's blog

We ae delighted to welcome Professor Piyushimita (Vonu) Thakuriah to the PASCAL Board. Vonu is a world-renowned expert on sustainable, socially just transport, and on the use of information, especially big data, to solve urban problems. PASCAL can benefit from Vonu's international experience at the cutting edge of research with immediate practical and policy relevance.

The 15th PASCAL Conference, to be held in Korea on 30 August - 1 September 2018 has an updated title and sub-themes. The venue is the city of Suwon, part of metropolitan Seoul, Korea. The co-organiser is the GyeonggiDo Provincial Institute of Lifelong Learning (GILL).  The main theme of this first East Asia PASCAL Conference is "Learning Cities, Learning Societies: Connecting Research, Policy and Practice to Meet Local and Global Challenges”.  

The year 2016 gives one pause. The attacks of January 2015 in Paris were directed against free speech and religious tolerance; they failed: Charlie Hebdo sales are up, and opinion polls show that overwhelmingly, the French have positive views of Muslims, Jews and Europe. The attacks of November 2015 in Paris and July 2016 in Nice however succeeded in destablising through fear: people changed their daily routines or vacation plans. The elections in the UK and US are more difficult to characterize because this time, in the West, fantasy defeated fact, emotion triumphed over reason.

Sitting in Paris, where I live, the end of 2015 is just a few days short of the anniversary of the assassinations on 7 January of the editors of Charlie Hebdo, police, and hostages taken in the Hyper Casher in St. Mandé two days later. What can we do, once the demonstrations and marches are over?

Each of us has something to contribute to illuminate the dark corners where ignorance and indifference slumber undisturbed.  In 2016 I will be researching and writing about what it means to be Jewish in contemporary France, a story more full of hope and confidence that what the journalists who specialise in superficial but spectacular stories would have you believe.  

I hope to join an association called Cordoba that is based in St Mandé and Vincennes that brings Christians, Moslems and Jews together.  We must, each of us, lead by example.  And there is more that we can do as part of PASCAL, reinforced in 2015 by two new centres at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico, a multi-ethnic, young and dynamic society, and at the University of Johannesburg, in South Africa’s largest city and also in a large multi-racial society.  

The 12th PASCAL Conference in Catania, so ably co-ordinated by Roberta Piazza, included many presentations on migration linked to our themes of learning city, culture, diversity and environmental sustainability.  The 13th PASCAL Conference to be held in Glasgow in early June 2016 will embrace an even larger audience and more themes. The much-expanded learning city network, led by Peter Kearns and Mike Osborne, will be very prominent in Glasgow: some dozen cities are already expected to attend.

But what we need next are more projects on the ground that come out of these events and the flow of papers, blogs and other communications. For this we need your ideas, and especially your efforts to promote what PASCAL can uniquely deliver. 

With best wishes for the new year,

Josef Konvitz
Chair, PASCAL International Observatory