AESOP 2025 conference app — offline agenda for 10+ tracks

Bringing Digital Conference Navigation to Urban Planning Researchers

The Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) annual congress is the largest gathering of urban planning academics in Europe. The 2025 edition at Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul welcomed roughly 1,000 participants from over 50 countries, many of whom were attending their first congress with a dedicated mobile app. With 10+ parallel thematic tracks—spanning housing policy, sustainable mobility, climate adaptation, participatory design, and spatial justice—navigating the dense five-day programme was a major challenge.

First Conference App for the AESOP Community

Unlike physics conferences accustomed to Indico-based apps, AESOP delegates traditionally relied on printed pocket programmes and PDF schedules emailed days before the congress. HEPCon’s mobile apps for iOS and Android introduced a searchable, filterable digital agenda for the first time. The LOC reported that within the first morning, over 700 participants had the app installed—a testament to how urgently the community needed better navigation.

Thematic Track Filters Across a Multi-Building Campus

Yildiz Technical University’s campus stretches across multiple buildings with sessions assigned to rooms in different faculties. HEPCon’s track filters let attendees toggle visibility to only their thematic tracks—for example, showing only “Climate Adaptation” or “Spatial Justice” sessions—so they could plan routes across the campus without manually cross-referencing the full schedule.

Offline Access for International Travellers

Many AESOP delegates were international travellers without local SIM cards. HEPCon’s offline caching ensured the full agenda, session abstracts, and speaker information were available without a data connection. Forty-five percent of app sessions were recorded in offline mode—the highest offline usage rate across all HEPCon deployments that year.

Promoting Sustainability and Equity Sessions

The LOC wanted to ensure that sessions on sustainability and equity received adequate visibility. HEPCon’s push-notification system was used to highlight keynote sustainability panels and roundtables, driving attendance to sessions that might otherwise have been lost in the volume of 250+ parallel slots.