16–17 November | USI, Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio.
This symposium will investigate the multiple ways in which recent and current urban conditions are represented, analysed, and informed, through drawings.
In the last decades, the notion of the city as a definable entity has been increasingly contested and reframed in relation to fluid and heterogenous urbanization processes. If the term still retains a collective intelligibility, this is because the urban imaginary is deeply rooted in individual lived experiences.
A key role in defining and reiterating urban imaginaries can be understood in relation to the way the city is depicted. The representation of the urban is not merely a descriptive operation, but one that deals with the epistemological challenges of how to know, understand, and study urban processes and conditions. At the same time, drawings are the instruments that allow urbanists, architects, and designers to envision and steer spatial and social transformations.
This symposium will investigate the multiple ways in which recent and current urban conditions are represented, analysed, and informed, through drawings. Among the multiplicity of urban processes constantly and simultaneously shaping the built environment, we are particularly interested in dynamics of urban expansion and densification (whether top-down and bottom-up), as well as shrinkage, exclusion, land speculation, and gentrification. We are similarly interested in the material and graphical analyses of social phenomena such as migration, demographic shifting, and intensive commuting.
We welcome contributions that investigate existing forms of urban representation – for example, institutional and administrative documentation, urban codes, maps, and construction drawings – as well as creative, subjective, situated, and propositional ways of visually depicting urban processes and conditions.
Speakers: Prof. Jonathan Sergison, ISUP (Istituto Studi Urbani e del Paesaggio), Accademia di architettura, Mendrisio; Prof. Dr. Tom Avermaete, Chair for the History and Theory of Urban Design, ETH Zurich.
Zoom Webinar: The event will be in-person, but it will be possible to follow it online via zoom at this link, Passcode: 161123.
Organisation
History and Theory of Urban Design, Prof. Dr. Tom Avermaete, ETH Zurich.
ISUP (Istituto Studi Urbani e del Paesaggio), USI, Accademia di architettura, Mendrisio.
Further information.