Hello,

On September 24 (Tuesday), the Land Issues Research Institute will hold its "257th Colloquium."

The speaker for this colloquium will be Professor Niraj Verma, who will present on the topic "What is Spatiality? A Wicked Problems Perspective." The event is scheduled to take place in Room 405, Building 223, starting at 14:00.

Below is a brief bio of the speaker and the abstract.

Short bio

Professor of Planning and Public Policy
L. Douglas Wilder School of Government & Public Affairs
Virginia Commonwealth University

Abstract:
The idea of wicked problems has existed since the late 1960s and 1970s. First identified by Horst Rittel for the design and planning fields, its popularity now extends to the physical and social sciences, engineering, management, planning, and even medicine. This popularity has recently expanded to discussions on land and environmental remediation. Typically, these discussions treat wicked problems as shorthand for difficult-to-solve issues. This cautions against simple solutions but does not enable alternate pathways. By shining a new light on spatiality, I will argue that spatial thinking arises when we treat land not just as property, commodity, or a point on a coordinate system but as a socially constructed asset nested within an inseparable milieu of social, cultural, economic, and institutional issues. Such a “wicked problems” perspective opens land and the coordinate system to nuanced questioning while illuminating promising directions in dealing with their intractability.

The lecture is jointly hosted by the Land Issues Research Institute and the Geography Department's BK21FOUR program. The colloquium is open to all members of Seoul National University, including students and faculty, as well as anyone interested in attending.

We hope this will be a space for reflection and open discussion, and we invite your active participation and support for the 257th Colloquium of the Land Issues Research Institute.

For further inquiries, please contact the Land Issues Research Institute at 02-880-6322.

Thank you.