Monthly Archives: January 2018

Urbanism at borders

Interdisciplinary Global Workshop for Research Network

Robert Gordon University is proud to be hosting the inaugural Interdisciplinary Global Workshop from Wednesday 5 to Saturday 8 September 2018. The event will take place at our Garthdee Campus, on the banks of the River Dee.

Border research emphases on the discourse analysis on critical issues and connotation of separation – demarcation – segregation and conflicts and translated and theorizing these issues in various patterns of urbanism. Borders determine the degree of how regions are positioned in the global maps with the condition with which regions are valued, categorised and marked by its capacity to create individual geographical identities and unique settlement patterns. Borders define socially and economically incompatible systems that influence the nature of mobility of goods, human traffic, and economic transactions that suggest temporal, subdued, blurring socio-cultural entities defined by urban orders. Borders create these blurring urban orders along its boundaries defined by lack of cohesiveness with either sides of a border.

Borders are more than geographically defined separations, but accounts of metamorphoses and metaphors that two neighbouring states are defined by the economy, politics, culture, and religion – manifested by its typological entities.

Mapping Borders reflecting on the following issues:

  • Characteristics of social displacement at the borders
  • Transient/temporal settlement
  • Typologies and Form of Settlement
  • Conflict and Cultural hybridity
  • The architecture of weak forms on borderlines
  • Regenerative architecture as a socio-cultural policy
  • A phenomenology of generic places
  • Borders invoke centres: is there a new foundation?
  • The occupation of place: between reality and authorities
  • Crisis communication and the ‘architecture’ of media
  • Quick solutions: the printed habitat
  • New Social formation/Social Capital

Borders Research Scopes

  • Collaborative research initiation among partnering countries – Intermediate actions
  • Collaborative thematic conferences – September 2018
  • Publication as monographs – post conference monograph with Springer
  • Filming and documentation – part of conference submission
  • Design charrette – school-level masters design studio projects

The deadline for abstracts is Tuesday 30 January 2018. Send abstract by email or post on or before to:

Helen Aggasild
Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment
Robert Gordon University
Sir Ian Wood Building,
Garthdee Road,
Aberdeen,
AB10 7GJ,

To find out more click here>>

Call for Papers: TANGIBLE – INTANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

TANGIBLE – INTANGIBLE HERITAGE(S) – DESIGN, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CRITIQUES ON THE PAST, PRESENT AND THE FUTURE

Place: University of East London

Dates: 14 – 15 June 2018

Abstracts: 01 April 2018

Abstract Submission Form

Early Abstracts reviewed on a rolling basis from 01 Jan 2018. This allows international delegates time to arrange travel plans.

 

This conference calls upon art and architectural historians, sociologists, cultural theoristsarchitectsplannersurban designers, to critique the urban conditions of the past with a view to informing the present.

Sample of themes: contemporary architecture and modes of production |  emerging forms in city planning  |  social and political history of urbanisation  globally |  representations of ‘the city’ in art  |  historic architecture as social text

Context:

In a time when the construction of New Towns is on the agenda in UK; when climate change threatens historic cities and landscapes in Asia; when the cultural industries turn our art and architectural history into economic models of development; when entire cities are being built from scratch across rural China; and socio-economic change is destroying industrial communities leaving people in the West in search for answers from politicians like of Donald Trump, what can we mean by ‘heritage’?

Our built environment of buildings, towns, cities and infrastructures are always, at inception, visions of a future. They also become – very quickly – the markings of the past. Framed as architectural history, these markings tend to be what we think of when discussing heritage. However, heritage is more than this. It is equally a question of artistic and media representations of the present and the past; the social milieus we destroy or reinforce as economies fade or grow; the societies we construct through varying forms of city governance; the artistic and political legacies we use as points of rupture in building the future.

Our buildings, towns, cities and their artistic and media representations then, are all visions of an aesthetic present. They are the realisation through design of what we can and wish to build. They are social constructions defining the way people live, think, develop and desire. They are economic contrivances marking out the interests of capital. They are expressions of knowledge and skills which can inform innovation. They are phenomena mediated equally by the arts, medias and actual experience. They are inevitably political at every level.

This conference suggests we cannot think of heritage in reductive terms, neither as isolated objects or images nor as a purely historic phenomenon. The decisions we take about this ‘heritage’ today are not only based on the past, they will inform the future.

 

Themes:

In redefining heritage as a historic, artistic, design, media, social, political, and economic issue, this conference attempts to open up the concept to a reading that is interdisciplinary. In questioning these relationships over time, it seeks to understand the past in light of the present and identify creative ways of operating in a globalised future.

Within this framework, the conference welcomes international specialists who will ask their own questions about history and the present, and thus help redefine the perspective of others: artarchitectural and social historianscultural theorists, architectsplanners and urban designers. Examples of questions we expect to be asked include, but are not limited to:

What role did and will art and design economies have on city development? How do the arts and the media create and distort our vision of built and social urban heritage? How have and can we preserve the architecture of the past while building for the present? What happens to community and social bonds when cities are replanned? How do changing economic conditions alter how we build and live in cities? How has craftmanship and knowledge typically informed contemporary modes of production and work through innovative processes…..

 

Disciplines:

We seek to explore definitions of ‘heritage’ by considering it from various angles: physical form, artistic formulation, political tool, social and media construct, economic reification and digital innovation. As a result, the conference welcomes presentations from specialists from multiple fields whose work overlaps with issues of heritage broadly defined: art historians, conservationists, architects, urban designers, cultural theorists, sociologists, artists, media and press historians, planners and more.

In this regard the event follows the expressly interdisciplinary dialogue set out by AMPS and the research and publication programme PARADE (Publication & Research in Art, Architectures, Design and Environments).

Find out more here…