{"id":1227,"date":"2012-05-09T11:00:45","date_gmt":"2012-05-09T17:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1227"},"modified":"2012-05-15T13:11:53","modified_gmt":"2012-05-15T19:11:53","slug":"bologna-debriefed-reflecting-on-contours-of-the-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1227","title":{"rendered":"Bologna Debriefed: Reflecting on “Contours of The City”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I\u2019m just back from the \u201cContours of The City Conference\u201d in Bologna, organized by the University of Bologna\u2019s Laboratorio di Ricerca Sulle Citt\u00e0<\/a>. \u00a0It was all good: terrific hosts, stimulating company, an elegant meeting venue, and great cuisine.<\/p>\n

The conference honored Giovanna Franci<\/a>, one of the co-founders of the Laboratorio and the \u00a0European side co-director of our Atlantis project<\/a> until her death in 2009. \u00a0An original and interdisciplinary thinker, Giovanna received some fitting tributes from colleagues, including Umberto Eco<\/a> who praised her for serving as an \u201cambassador of Italian culture in barbarian countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The conference was small and intimate. \u00a0The sessions<\/a> were sequential so attendees could hear every presentation.\u00a0 There were sessions on urban destruction and regeneration, urban \u201cmapping\u201d (in both its physical and ideological senses), urban sustainability (including problems around fear and security), and representations of the urban (specifically, Venice, Paris, London, and some other cities).\u00a0 A variety of disciplinary and \u00a0interdisciplinary perspectives were on offer. \u00a0Most presentations were in English and the remaining few in Italian. \u00a0I was a participant in the session on destruction and regeneration, and I\u2019ve posted my talk on \u201cUrban Imaginaries and American Infill\u201d to the Presentations<\/a> page of this website. \u00a0It\u2019s also available here<\/a>.\u00a0 All presentations will be published in book form by the Laboratorio later this year or early next. \u00a0This will be the third book to emerge from Laboratorio events.\u00a0 The first is a very handsome volume on Looking at The City in Transformation<\/em>.\u00a0 The second will deal with Brasilia.\u00a0 The Laboratorio\u2019s list of past and future events and conferences<\/a> is impressive (full disclosure: I’m a member of the Laboratorio’s Enlarged Scientific Committee<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Conference Meeting Room: Capella Farnese, Palazzo d'Accursio (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

A few presentations directly related to themes explored on this blog and also spoke to each other in interesting ways. \u00a0I’ll mention just a couple to give a sense of range.\u00a0Dushko Bogunovich<\/a> (Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand) spoke on \u201cThe City and The Crunch: Contours of a Pending Disaster.\u201d\u00a0 Like many other urbanists, Dushko predicts an impending “perfect storm” for cities wrought by climate change, population growth, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss.\u00a0 To weather the storm we must change our collective institutions (what Dushko terms \u201cgroupware\u201d), individual behavior (\u201csoftware\u201d), and technology (\u201chardware\u201d).\u00a0 One of Dushko\u2019s points is that low density urbanism is not necessarily a barrier to a sustainable future if it is resilient<\/em>.\u00a0 This contrasts with some significant current thinking about American urban sustainability<\/a>. \u00a0Dushko also stressed that what we do in our educational institutions<\/a> will be key to addressing the emerging crisis; specifically, we need to rethink dominant paradigms in town planning, urban design, and civil engineering.<\/p>\n

Guido Moretti<\/a> (a Bologna-based urban planner and engineer) picked up on some of these points. \u00a0He struck a more hopeful note in a very interesting speech (translated for me on-the-fly by Elena Lamberti, for which I\u2019m extremely grateful!) on \u201cProtecting Cities.\u201d \u00a0The speech examined cities in the Islamic tradition.\u00a0 Signore Moretti detailed some characteristics of the often secluded \u201cmedina<\/a>\u201d that spring up, and thrive, in surroundings that present severe challenges of extreme heat and scarce water.\u00a0\u00a0 The medina embody knowledge, accumulated over thousands of years, about how to plan and build in such environments so as to guarantee not only survival but also an intense, productive, and secure social life.\u00a0\u00a0 Streets are lively, welcoming areas of socialization and commerce.\u00a0 Towers, domes, patios, underground canals, fountains, reflecting surfaces, and other elements of infrastructure harvest water from desert winds and sands and thermo-regulate the city.\u00a0 In Signore Moretti\u2019s words, the Islamic medina \u201crepresents a useful and topical reference point with respect to our wastefully expensive and negligent modernity.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0They provide lessons in appropriate and sustainable urbanism.\u00a0 I\u2019d argue that such reference points and lessons, along with the paradigmatic rethinking mentioned by Dushko, should be a vital part of any progressive curriculum in contemporary urban planning and design.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Paris Street in Rainy Weather (Gustave Caillebotte)<\/p><\/div>\n

Finally, several scholars gave presentations dealing with the fl\u00e2neur<\/a><\/em> \u2013the writer, poet, intellectual, and assorted others who observe city life by walking among the crowd.\u00a0 Although I assign a bit of John Gay<\/a> when I teach study abroad in London<\/a>, prior to this conference I hadn\u2019t thought much about what the literature on fl\u00e2nerie<\/em> could contribute to understanding and regenerating the city.\u00a0 \u00a0I certainly learned from the presenters that there’s significant debate about how to define and deploy the concept of fl\u00e2neur<\/em> in studies of the city.\u00a0 Those debates notwithstanding, I was struck by the suggestion of Giampaolo Nuvolati<\/a>, an urban sociologist at the University of Milan, that we might produce better urban planners\u2014and thus better contexts and settings for conducting urban social life\u2014if we require our students to research, and experience the city as, fl\u00e2neurs<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Included in the conference agenda \u00a0were tours of the art\u00a0 collections of the Pallazo d\u2019Accursio<\/a> and the Pinacoteca<\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0 two intermezzos consisting of readings on “Imaginary Cities.” The conference ended with a screening of the cult film Koyaanisqatsi<\/a><\/em>, which I\u2019m embarrassed to admit I saw for the very first time given that in an earlier life I researched and wrote about the Ancestral Pueblo<\/a> Indians, including ancestors of the Hopi<\/a> and Zuni<\/a>.\u00a0 The film certainly provided an appropriate end–and a compelling challenge–to a conference of urbanists dedicated to analyzing the quality, pace, and sustainability of urban life. \u00a0Another positive outcome of the conference was meeting, through my friend and colleague Gabriele Manelli (a Research Fellow in the University of Bologna\u2019s Department of Sociology<\/a>) some other scholars doing interesting research on urban poverty, homelessness and the built environment. \u00a0More on that to come…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Palazzo d' Accursio and Piazza Maggiore (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m just back from the \u201cContours of The City Conference\u201d in Bologna, organized by the University of Bologna\u2019s Laboratorio di Ricerca Sulle Citt\u00e0. \u00a0It was all good: terrific hosts, stimulating company, an elegant meeting venue, and great cuisine. The conference […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-sustainability","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-jN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1227"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1248,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions\/1248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}