2019 b « Sixty years after City Invincible, surveys and the urban revolution in question », Origini XLI, p. 45-60. (original) (raw)
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For some time now, the field of urban studies has been attempting to figure the urban whilst cognisant of the fact that the city exists as a highly problematic category of analysis. In this virtual special issue, we draw together some examples of what we call urban concepts under stress; concepts which appear to be reaching the limits of their capacity to render knowable a world characterised by the death of the city and the ascent of multi-scalar de-territorialisations and re-territorialisations. We organise the papers selected for inclusion into three bundles dealing respectively with complex urban systems, the hinterland problematic and governing cities in the age of flows. The phenomenon of urban concepts under stress stems from the existence of a gap between existing cartographies, visualisations and lexicons of the urban and 21st century spatial conditions and territorialities. Given that this disarticulation will surely increase as this century unfolds, a pressing question pr...
i QUADERNI Rappresentazioni urbane
2013
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Since ancient times, the city has been perceived as a peculiar living environment, distinguished from the surrounding territories by a series of quite specific dynamics, phenomena, and characters. Going beyond the gaze, then, also means trying to grasp that fabric of relationships, affects, perceptions – at times intangible, but also very tangible – that each generation has experienced as typical of its own time. More specifically, the macro-session includes (but is not limited to) the following themes: Sound and the city: soundscapes, the places for music, voices and noises in the city Times and rhythms of city life: perception of change, places of memory, sense of the present and the horizon of the future Urban detectability: signs, boundaries, landmarks and orientation in the city Places and practices of dwelling: settlement geographies, domestic spaces, neighborhood practices The city and generations: topographies and histories of intergenerational exchange, trends, and conflicts Sentimental geographies: the city and emotions, family relationships, the affectivity of places The construction of city identity: rhetorics of belonging, forms and practices of citizenship, mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion, the spaces of politics and the places of urban sociability DEADLINE FEBRUARY 15, 2023
This article scrutinizes the effects of 1968 student protests and events on architectural pedagogy and epistemology within the European and American contexts. Through the juxtaposition of the transformations that followed the 1968 events, mainly within the north-American and Italian contexts, it shows how the approaches vis-à-vis the concept of urban renewal, in the case of Italy, and the concept of “nuova dimensione”, in the case of Italy, were reoriented and progressively abandoned. The central argument is that the strategies elaborated, in the American context, to criticize urban renewal architecture were based on principles that pushed architectural discourse away from the real, either neutralizing the real, as in the case of Peter Eisenman, or reducing the real city into its image, as in the case of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In parallel and in contrast with the situation in the United States, in Europe, and mainly in Italy, the effects of a network of significant events that preceded and followed 1968, extending from the battles at Valle Giulia in 1963 to the occupation by students of the 15th Triennale di Milano in 1968 and the event “Utopia e/o Rivoluzione” at the Politecnico di Torino in 1969, triggered the rejection of the concept of “nuova dimensione” in favour of the rediscovery of the immediacy of reality, the "locus" and the civic dimension of architects' role in society. The purpose of the article is double-fold: firstly, it unfolds the mutations of pedagogical strategies and epistemological tools of architecture that were shaped because of the student protests in Italy and North America; secondly, it explains why the 1968 effects on architectural pedagogy and epistemology in Europe, and especially in Italy, were linked to the demand to reinvent and reinforce the relation of architecture to the real, in contrast with the North-American context, where the 1968 effects were associated with the invention of strategies that reinforced the liberation of architecture from the real.
We live in an urban world -where, for almost every one of us today, the way we live and what we experience is captured within what we think of as 'the urban'. Our lives have become suspended and constituted within fast-moving, connected, and technologically mediated worlds. But at the very moment that 'the urban' comes to constitute our whole lives, the term itself, it seems, loses its foundation. It loses its opposite -the countryside or the periphery. That which is 'not city', which is 'outside' to the 'inside' of the city, and which the city needs, as the figure needs the ground, in order to specify its outline and its form, becomes something viewed through the windscreen of a fast-moving car or from the window of a high-speed train. It becomes a scenery for a still urban existence. Pointing out today that our world is urban is to point to the only remaining pole of the duality, and to realize that we point only at a state of our being. The problem for us at this point in time is not so much, as Lefebvre could still proclaim in the last century, a problem of 'the urban' as a distinctively different mode of existence, as it is simply a problem of existence itself and of our being in a contemporary world.
Chiesa …, 2008
Josè de Sousa Saramago suggests how we live in many places but, in fact, we inhabit the memory. In the German culture, the idea of ‘inhabiting the memory’ is captured by the expression: Heimat. This word refers to the meaning that we assign to a place perceived as owned and formative. Heim (home) and Heimat (fatherland) have the same root. The former defines the domesticity, the latter the known places, those in which we are safe. However, the dimension of these certain places, namely our ‘Heimat’, is today, de facto, only one part of our living spaces. For many generations we have been living in many places, very often ‘undifferentiated’ places, ‘meaningless’ for negligence and ‘forgettable’ for urgencies and immediacies. As a result, the urban spaces we live in appear to us either astounding or banal. Very often they remind us ‘other scenarios’ we have actually lived in or we have seen as ‘transmitted images’. Perhaps only a ‘strong’ memory and, thus, a grounded culture, allows us to recognize them and to express a balanced judgment, meaning neither dazed nor annoyed. For how long have cities lost their being a ‘collective home’? The ‘villages’ we come from (also, old quarters?) can generate the intimate sense of the Heimat; however, have urban peripheries ever generated memories? In fact, it is difficult to believe so! For relational spaces, that is, for spaces of active social interactions, being able to generate memories, it is necessary that they enable a collective ‘transformation’ together with allowing for the flourishing of singularities and exceptions, provided also that the precariousness and individualism of social and economic expectations are reduced. Do multiple collectivities and, thus, multiple ‘memories’, prevent the construction of urban spaces which can be knowable/recognizable by all people who live them? Perhaps overcoming such apparent impossibility might result from taking inspiration from consolidated experiences in other disciplines. Let us think of International Orchestras such as the Baremboim’s West Eastern Divan or Dance Companies such as the one led by Pina Bausch. An Arabic-Israeli orchestra operates as a unit because it needs to construct a structure, a symphony for example, through a musical form which derives from a precise discipline: they represent where a discipline can and must lead us. As stressed by Baremboim, together with the discipline there is the ‘passion’ through which the Director extracts the ‘domesticity’ embedded in the musicians, all different in culture and ‘memories’. The Tanztheater Wuppertal builds a representation in slow motion, by adding the different origins and experiences of dancers coming from all around the world and by sharing the common end, as Pina Bausch clarifies, of making people able to ‘grasp by intuition something that has been living within us all along’. This existence ‘within us all along’ may restore trust in the possibility of building the city of the future, going back to a measure of the city articulated as recognizable parts and not by functional hierarchies, in other words to ‘dis-measured’ cities.
The study of Postmodern architecture demands freedom from any preconceived rule or traditional stylistic analysis. Because of this dogma, urban transformations have been brought to postmodern cities in recent decades. Some of these are chaotic and are not related to the urban experience of the individual. Thus, the modification of space and time in a city generates a brand-new architecture – a reflection of a renewed society, freed from the philosophical, aesthetic and social concerns of the central decades of the twentieth century. A formerly attempt to establish a quaint and recognisable typology of " local architecture " is now discarded, then refusing the sense of unique identity of the city and which in the past, promoted the urban memory of the inhabitants. Urban spaces are created far from historical centres, built deprived of both history and memory. The individual, therefore, is unable to find a relationship between these " anti-cities " , familiarity and daily life. The citizen appears nowadays as seemingly detached from these new and disproportionate constructions, spaces that show no architectural personality. Urban models are presented as the assimilation or systematic copying favors of interaction with the individual. This new city model is based on the copy, in the simulacrum of reality itself.