Hosted by the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, the 2nd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (SMUS Conference) and the 1st RC33 Regional Conference “Latin America: Brazil” are going to take place online from Thursday September 8th to Saturday September 10th, 2022. The SMUS Conference Brazil 2022 aims at furthering the global dialogue on methods by scholars and researchers from all over the world and all social and spatial sciences (e. g. anthropology, area studies, architecture, communication studies, computational sciences, digital humanities, educational sciences, geography, historical sciences, humanities, landscape planning, philosophy, psychology, sociology, urban design, urban planning, traffic planning and environmental planning) by focusing especially on the following themes:
1. Spatial methods
2. Process-oriented, longitudinal and historical methods
3. Decolonizing social science methodology
4. Methods from, by and/or for the Global South
5. Overcoming methodological nationalism
6. Cross-cultural methods, transnational research and issues of comparability
7. Quantitative methods
8. Qualitative methods
9. Mixed methods
10. Strategies of data collection, storage and access
11. Digital methods, big data and digital humanities
12. Mobile, arts- and/or design-based methods
13. Interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary, participatory and/or collaborative research methods
14. Applied research methods for urban design, urban planning, traffic planning and environmental planning
15. Evaluation methods and methods of scientific validation
16. Research ethics
17. Methodological issues relevant for specific research topics (for example, urban research, sustainability research, social housing, crime and public safety, or spatial inequalities concerning gender, race and/or ethnicity)
Each subject is more or less directly addressed by the five Actions that underpin the Global Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (GCSMUS). In order to implement these Actions at USP this University and Technische Universität Berlin have signed a five-year cooperation agreement.
The GCSMUS lead partner institution at USP is the Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences (FFLCH), and more specifically its Department of Sociology.