Shaping the City: scars and sutures
A comparison between urban initiatives in Bucharest, post-Socialism, and London, post-Localism, reveals how politics can shape the urban fabric.
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Issue 2Local-Eyes!
Local-Eyes! explores the role of the 'local' in building the 'local' community. Whether self organized, rallied together by a leader or a leading organization, teams of individuals can be extremely powerful in shaping cities. This issue's articles, part 1 of a two-part issue on bottom-up initiatives, demonstrate this through theory and practice, through explanations of transformations of post-Soviet cities to explications of the Venice Biennale and the Richard Rogers' Inside Out exhibit.
Features
Partizaning: participatory art, research and creative urban activism
Partizaning leverages artistic interventions in Moscow’s public spaces as tools for social research and transformation, blurring the boundaries between everyday life, urbanism, activism and art.
The Sound of Cycling
The 2013 Velo-city Conference in Vienna, Austria, brought together citizens, policymakers, and business people to discuss how cycling can become mainstream in both developed and developing countries.
Neighbourhood Planning: unlikely urban disruptor creating new citizen professionals and community clients
The world is entering into the age of the ‘Social City’: increasingly, citizens are becoming more interested and engaged in shaping their communities, and planning professionals must respond by empowering people to exert their ‘Right to the City’.
Rigorous and critical creative thinking: Central St Martins Product design degree show 2013
A review of Central St Martins Product design degree show reveals that students are equally interested in rigorous and critical creative thinking as in sound technical skills.
‘Post-something’ – actions and voices of a generation under 35: the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2013
The 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Close, Closer, addresses the challenges and opportunities facing Europe as a result of the recent economic crisis.
The Enciclopedic Palace, the 55th International Art Biennale
Below an introduction by Urbanista’s Editor-in-chief, Lucy Bullivant, Christine Styrnau recounts the highlights of this year’s Venice Biennale.
Recycling Socialism, Tallinn Architectural Biennale 2013
‘Recycling Socialism’ was the theme of this year’s Architectural Biennale in Tallinn, Estonia. In an effort to reflect Estonians’ conflicted relationship with the country’s Socialist past, curators hosted exhibitions in some of the capital’s most iconic and problematic buildings.
Inside Out: Richard Rogers – an architect on message and medium
What do you do with a celebratory exhibition about your work? Use it as an opportunity to convey messages, a soap box, a meeting point of all the things you hold dear, stir people up.
News
Serpentine Augmented Architecture Open Call
Serpentine Augmented Architecture, a global open call for creative practitioners to design groundbreaking architectural structure to be developed and experienced in augmented reality (AR) on site at the Serpentine Gallery in summer 2019, has been launched (1 Feb 2019) by the Serpentine Galleries in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture. The deadline for entries is
The Pixel HUT
The Pixel HUT is a visual and interactive structure – part architecture design, part performance installation – challenging the identity and function of the primitive hut, which has now been presented in three different iterations. It’s an ongoing interdisciplinary design research project by HUT Architecture in collaboration with Universal Assembly Unit and Dinner at 29.
Close Encounters of the Seoul Kind: Seoul International Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (SIBAU)
A major international symposium staged in October 2016 to discuss the new SIBAU – Seoul International Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism – anticipated a paradigm shift in Seoul’s architecture culture and co-created regenerative urban design processes How can a city be experimental with itself? In Victorian times in the UK philanthropists applied notable social experiments
‘Self-driven city’: the 2015 Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB)
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, one of the three Baltic States, and formerly a Soviet republic until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, when it regained its independence and became a democratic republic, has just half a million inhabitants, while overall across its fifteen counties there are 1.3 million. The 2015 Tallinn Architecture Biennale,
Remake – We Make opens at the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture Shenzhen
An exhibition pavilion, design-build structure workshop and discussion programme, created by a unique team from the UK, Norway and China for the national, regional and thematic pavilions section of the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture Shenzhen, 5 December 2015-28 February 2016. Exhibitors including: WORKSHOP architecture, Assemble – announced on 7 December 2015 as winners of the
‘Dwell in possibility’*: forthcoming issue of Urbanista.org, out in spring 2019!
Dwell in possibility’, the next issue of Urbanista.org is coming soon, including interviews with Karakusevic Carson; Darryl Chen (Hawkins\Brown); Adam Khan; and Mexico-City based Francisco Pardo and a discussion of the contribution of a range of events staged over the last few years including Mobilising the Periphery #5: Europe, ANCB, Berlin (2018); the Nordic Urban Lab (Helsinki/Espoo, 2018); Cities for All: Gentrification, Public Space and the Tools of Placemaking, Stockholm, 2018; and RTPI’s 2017 UK planning overview, London. What kinds of new relationships can be fostered between ports and their hinterlands, and between cities, ports and their territories of water, can be shaped? A report from the Port City Talks Antwerp-Istanbul exhibition, MAS, Antwerp, part of the Europalia biennial there (2015-16).
ecoLogicStudio’s BIO-URBAN Design Lab in the Sonoran desert, Arizona
The BIO-URBAN Design Lab, led by Marco Poletto and Claudia Pasquero – founders of ecoLogicStudio and leaders of the BIO Urban Design Research Cluster of the MArch Urban Design programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL – embarked in a research trip to the Sonoran desert in Arizona in March 2014.
Lucy Bullivant’s book Masterplanning Futures wins the Urban Design Group’s Book of the Year 2014
The Urban Design Group’s National Urban Design Awards 2014 were presented on 12 February during an evening showcasing some great examples of urban design work produced throughout the UK over the past twelve months. Lucy Bullivant’s title Masterplanning Futures was awarded the 2014 Book of the Year Award and, in describing the title, the Urban
Rebooting the Masterplan
Lucy Bullivant and Thomas Ermacora present Rebooting the Masterplan Limewharf Vyner Street, London, E2 9DJ Urbanista.org, in conjunction with the Recode Gallery at Limewharf, continues its popular series of events with Rebooting the Masterplan, two evening talks and discussions investigating contemporary progressive masterplanning ideals and strategies, staged in collaboration with the Urban Design Group. The conventional masterplanning model
FAT breaks up the band
Featured in both the book Anglo Files: rising UK architecture (Thames & Hudson, 2005), one of my publications, and Space Invaders, the British Council international touring exhibition, 2001-3, I curated with Pedro Gadanho (a catalogue is still available, and a series of video interviews filmed by Elliott Chaffer is now a collectors’ item), the irrepressible