Human Cities Festival 2010
Human Cities Symposium

Vr 07 mei 2010, 09:00
Day 1 : Conferences

09:05 — Luca PATTARONI (CH)
EPFL – Institut Marcel Mauss

Town together, emancipations and tyrannies within the ordinary of the urban world.
These three phases will allow us to draft a few possibilities for a renewed public action tending to make up a town which would indeed be multifaceted, make space for people despite their different rhythms, convictions and capacities, and for experiences being held at the limits of politics, such as bonding, conviviality and creativity.

HIGHLIGHT 1: THE TOWN AS A TOOL

10:00 — Paolo INGHILLERI (I)
Universitat di Milano

Creative communities.
We will discuss how places and towns can become creative living artifacts through our experiences, conflicts and desires.

10:35 — Tim FENDLEY (UK)
Applied Information Group

Legible London – a wayfinding system for the capital.
Designing a mapping tool for walkers, along with an array of central data resources to connect information and providers together.

HIGHLIGHT 2: THE LABORATORY TOWN

11:40 — Bas RAIJMAKERS (NL)
STBY – Design Academy Eindhoven

Empathic Conversations through Design Documentaries.
How visual stories can help interdisciplinary design teams to step into the shoes of the future users of their designs and develop relationships with them.

12:15 — PUBLIC WORKS (UK) (Kathrin BOHM & Andreas LANG)
Public Works

DIY regeneration – Build it yourself.
Public Works is a London based artists and architects collective. The focus of this session is the spatial or the contextual. The intention is to raise our awareness of those spatial realities and constructions.

HIGHLIGHT 3: THE MEDIATING TOWN

14:00 — Miodrag MITRASINOVIC (US)
School of Design Strategies – Parsons The New School for Design

Urban play and recreation.
The “Urban Play and Recreation” course was initiated in collaboration with the New York Department of Parks and Playgrounds to explore the relationship that exists between leisure activities and urban playgrounds in New York.

14:35 — Luc LEVESQUE (CA)
Université Laval

Furnishing tactics and urban public space: a few experiments.
A series of experiments will be presented, focusing on usage and adapted layout and furnishing of under-utilized urban sites that are convenient places to stop for a while.

15:10 — Ezio MANZINI (IT)
Politecnico di Milano

Design and the social construction of public space.
The history of cities is the history of two structurally correlated systems, one social and one material: the material city and the social city generate each other. Up to now, academics and designers have mainly focused their attention on the material city. Confronted with such a situation, they are shifting their attention, and issues relating to the social city and this will outline a new way of designing.

HIGHLIGHT 3: ORCHESTRATING THE TOWN

16:20 — Mathias HEYDEN (D)
Ispara

Evolving Participatory Design. A report from Berlin, reaching beyond!.
Mathias Heyden focuses the discusses trajectories of self-determined and common oriented design meant to foster radical-democratic and just, holisticsustainable societies yet to come.

Za 08 mei 2010, 09:20
Morning Workshop A

THE TOWN AS A TOOL

09:20 — Jean-Michel DECROLY & Olivier GOSSELAIN (BE)
ULB

Sensory walks in Brussels.
Using the relations between the body and the material environment, they present the results of an experience of an urban itinerary where students were encouraged to discover the town using all their senses, and trying not to give priority to what they see.

09:40 — Sabine GUISSE (BE)
ISACF – La Cambre

Public spaces “empowering” and “disempowering”, users between town as a tool and suffered town.
Describing the capacitating and decapacitating potential of space for each figure of interaction between users and the urban environment.

Za 08 mei 2010, 09:20
Morning Workshop B

THE LABORATORY TOWN

09:20 — Matej NIKISIC (SLO)
UIRS

Revealing users’ mental images of urban public space.
Getting to know user’s mental image by in-depth interviewing, revealing the strong relation between the usage patterns of urban spaces and user’s mental images of these spaces.

09:40 — Barbara GOLICNIK MARUSIC (SLO)
UIRS

Mapping of dynamic patterns of users to inform public space design.
This research is a critical inquiry about spatial relationships between occupancy and the physical structure of squares and parks in city centres. It focuses on usability and the spatial capacity of places, from two different angles.

10:00 — Petra MARGUC (F)
Polimorph

Pluridisciplirary approaches, participation and integration into urban projects.
Alongside recent in situ productions, Petra will illustrate the tools and methods Polimorph is developing to investigate and design urban environments in a way to include multiple actors into the process.

Za 08 mei 2010, 09:20
Morning Workshop C

THE MEDIATING TOWN

09:20 — Isabelle DOUCET (UK)
Manchester Architecture Research Centre

Interdisciplinary and/or Transdisciplinary city-making.
Cities are to be developed in both a interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary manner. This talk aspires to look into some of the tensions that continue to sabotage an elaborate mediation of urban questions.

09:40 — Masa CVETKO (SLO)
ProstoRož

ProstoRož association.
ProstoRož is a continuous project of public space cultivation, its goal developing a method of reviving and arranging of the degraded urban spaces.

Za 08 mei 2010, 09:20
Morning Workshop D

ORCHESTRATING THE TOWN

09:20 — François JEGOU (BE)
Strategic Design Scenarios

Supporting social change and sustainability on the territory. Residences of the public innovation laboratory 27e Region in France.
Presentation of 15 ‘residences’ intended as long period immersions of multidisciplinary design-driven creative teams in local public institutions.

Za 08 mei 2010, 02:00
Afternoon Workshop A

09:20 — Viviana NAROTZKY, Beth GALI, Josep M. SERRA (SP, Santa Cole), Josep BOHIGAS ARNAU (BOPBAA Arquitectes)

Barcelona’s Transformation and visions of the 21st Century City.
Spanish political transition, the rise of the nationalist discourse in Catalonia, design and architecture provided Barcelona with the foundations of its new urban narrative. The concepts of local identity and modernity materialized in urban environments and everyday objects accessible to everyone.

Za 08 mei 2010, 02:00
Afternoon Workshop B

14:00 — Wouter VANDERSTEDE (Kind & Samenleving), Peter & Julie Anne VERBEELEN (BE, Turtlewings)

Spatial analysis with/by children.
How can we take advantage of children’s own spatial perspective for analysis and qualitative design of public space? Presentation of several experiments meant to listen to youth and involve them when designing their public spaces.

Vr 07 mei 2010, 12:00
Afternoon Workshop C

14:00 — Thomas ERMACORA (IT/UK), Clear Village

Clear Village.
The intention of this initiative is not to build a ‘perfect place’, but rather to foster a dynamic, living community which embraces principles, technologies and forms of governance that allow for a more sustainable future of living and can provide a benchmark for other communities to follow.

Vr 07 mei 2010, 12:00
Afternoon Workshop D

14:00 — Roger BURTON (BE), BRASS

Pas de Quartier.
Presentation of the “Pas de Quartier!” web platform project and its theoretical back office, plus perspectives for developing it as a tool for urban action. “Pas de Quartier” will try to show and to voice this territorial layer-cake, by focusing on creative use of formal and popular maps of the urban environment in a neighborhood.