The Department of Urban Planning and Design at the BME (http://urb.bme.hu/) wishes to promote cooperation among Central-Eastern European (CEE) architectural doctoral institutions, building up a network for future generations of scholars through their specific fields of research. Throughout Europe, current urban challenges are posed by large-scale ensembles of modernity as a result of post-war development on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The doctoral conference is dedicated to the post-war urban heritage in Central-Eastern Europe, and this theme is divided into four sub-topics which are common and relevant phenomena in this part of Europe: prefab mass housing as the Communist living norm, abnormally high amounts of former industrial sites, recreational areas that have transformed nature into urbanized landscape, and the (in)formal components of urban networks. The urb/doconf 2015 is the first in a series of a doctoral conferences to be organised on a biyearly basis, which will provide a comparative overview of current doctoral research into the physical – built and natural – environment within CEE. The invited chairs of the conference are from the four Visegrad countries – Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. The, - selected lecturers – doctoral researchers, PhD candidates and post-doctoral researchers (maximum five years after obtaining the doctorate degree) – specialise in architecture, urban design, urban planning or landscape architecture and represent ten CEE countries. In addition to theoretical questions, we would like to find pragmatic approaches when responding to the new challenges of sustainability and when determining what kind of protection tool-kit is capable of addressing large-scale ensembles problems. Our aim is to discover special similarities and dissimilarities within the Central-Eastern European physical environment, to discuss a wide range of options (from preservation to sustainable renewal processes) and to create a network of architectural PhD researchers. We are also interested in different research methodologies used in architectural doctoral studies: theoretical frameworks, comparative studies, morphological case studies, research by design methodology, etc. We hope that the conference is an important step towards recognising our common field of research field, reconciling our Central-Eastern European knowledge with that of the West and defining new ways of thinking about urban heritage.
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