Date: Wednesday, 29 January 2020
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker: Franziska Sielker
Talk Title: ‘A Planner’s Perspective – The Use of Spatial Analysis for Policy Making in Border Regions’
Location: Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College

The next St Catharine’s Political Economy Seminar in the series on the Economics of Austerity, will be held on 29 January 2020 –Franziska Sielker will give a talk on “A Planner’s Perspective – The Use of Spatial Analysis for Policy Making in Border Regions”. The seminar will be held in the Ramsden Room at St Catharine’s College from 6.00-7.30 pm. All are welcome. The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Economics and Policy Group at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Speaker:
Franziska Sielker is a Lecturer, Planning and Housing, at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Land Economy. Before taking up the Lectureship, Dr Sielker has been Lead Researcher on a project of ‘Future Cities in the Making- Overcoming Barriers to Information Modelling’, funded by the Centre for Digital Built Britain and a British Academy Newton International Postdoc Fellow for a project on power relationships in European spatial policies. Frannziska Sielker has been Interim Professor and Acting Chair of the Chair of ‘International Planning Studies’ in the academic year 2018/2019 at the TU Dortmund University, Germany. Her PhD was at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Human Geography. Her research interests cover European cohesion policies and spatial governance, cross-border regions, influences of foreign direct investments, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, on national planning processes and digitalisation in planning. Dr Sielker has published in terms of her research interests.

Talk Overview
How do spatial planners make use of economic data? What are the differences in understanding spatial analysis? The Land Economy course is a genuine interdisciplinary course, in which links between economic research and planning are crucial. Against this background, my aim is threefold. First, I introduce the differences in how planners and economists’ approach, understand and use the same concepts and terms.
Second, I outline how planners make use of economic indicators as one aspect within ‘spatial analysis’ to build narratives feeding into policy making. Third, I illustrate regional development perspectives in the example of border regions, understood as national, regional and local borders. Traditionally, cross-border integration is associated with an increasing economic integration. Yet, often borders act ‘as a resource’
(Sohn Christophe, 2014). The talk illustrates how economic disparities and economic similarities can both play important roles in fostering cross-border spatial integration. In this talk, I build on a development study of the Bavarian-Czech border, as well as on the results of various research projects conducted between 2013 and 2019.

Please contact the seminar organisers Philip Arestis (pa267@cam.ac.uk) and Michael Kitson (mk24@cam.ac.uk) in the event of a query