Last spring, Professor Bent Flyvbjerg from Aalborg University in Aalborg, Denmark, visited the University of Iowa as an Ida Beam Visiting Scholar. From March 27 through 29, 2006, Jim Throgmorton will return the favor by being an invited participant in a special seminar sponsored by the Department of Urban Planning and Management at Aalborg.

Focused on the interaction of narrative and power in planning, this special seminar was organized by Professor Ole B. Jensen. It will include lectures by Jensen, Flyvbjerg, and Throgmorton on power/narrative theory and cases, but it will also include group work with assignments, student presentations, and a plenary round table with students and lecturers. Jim's lecture ("Inventing the Greatest: Making the Louisville City-Region a More Sustainable Place") will be drawn from his on-going work on planning in Louisville, Kentucky. It's a substantially modified version of a paper he has presented to diverse audiences at conferences in Chicago, Portland, and Louisville. Jensen will speak about "The Narrative Turn in Planning and Policy Analysis," and Bent Flyvbjerg will lecture on "Power in Planning."

"I'm really excited to be participating in this event with Bent and Ole," Jim says. "Given what Ole, Bent, and I have written on the topic, the intellectual sparks are likely to fly."