The international workshop Building One Space for Action: City-Regional Imaginaries and the Reduction of Net Land Take takes place at the University of Kassel, Germany, from Wednesday, 4 November, to Friday, 6 November 2026. Organised within the RSA Research Network Bridging Governance Gaps in City-Regions: Addressing Land Take and City-Region Building Through Comparative Research, the workshop brings together scholars working on the institutional, spatial and discursive challenges of constituting city-regions as shared spaces for action.

It explores how territorial imaginaries, governance arrangements and material spatial processes shape city-region building and the pursuit of no-net-land-take objectives.

Following a welcome dinner on Wednesday evening, the workshop opens on Thursday with keynote lectures by John Harrison (Loughborough University) and Marco Pütz (Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL). Sessions address drivers and spatial configurations of land take, city-regional development strategies, transition governance, cross-boundary cooperation and the governance of peri-urban areas. The programme also includes excursions to Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe and the Hercules monument and to Kassel’s inner city and Karlsaue, offering perspectives on Kassel’s urban and regional development.

A Thursday evening roundtable, “How to Build One Space for Action?”, brings together Petra Schelkmann (Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region Association), Markus Kaltenbach (Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences) and Rainer Danielzyk (Leibniz University Hannover) to discuss practical and conceptual approaches to city-regional cooperation. The workshop concludes on Friday with parallel sessions on territorial visions, land-take governance and cross-boundary planning, followed by a fishbowl discussion on key takeaways for building one shared space for action.