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Urbanity (Urbanität) has played a significant role in the definition of urban design over the past few decades, in Germany as well as in Western Europe, in general. Triggered by Edgar Salin’s analysis of the “cities without urbanity” at the eleventh annual meeting of the Association of German Cities (Deutscher Städtetag) in Augsburg in 1960, the concept has accompanied the postmodern renaissance of the traditional city as the setting of the contract for a new life and its corresponding culture. After being employed as the catchword of the failed attempt to plan “urbanity through density” in the newly built ensembles, the word became part of politics, and part of the competition between cities, based on the image of the crowded street, packed with activities, of the 19th century. The 1990s were still governed by these attempts to revive the traditional urbanity, albeit more and more criticized as devoid festivism. However, the industrial decline and the complex changes prompted by the 1989 revolutions turned the attention towards the social and spatial issues outside the historical centers, leading the way to two core ideas that have influenced the urban theories of the new millennium: (1) that the representation of urbanity as a purified image of the pre-industrial times is actually the trap of a nostalgia which has very little to do with the current urban phenomena; and (2) that the new urbanity has to be searched in the ruins of the industrial and the functionalist urbanism, in the informal, alternative, non-conventional territories of the sprawl. One of the landmarks of this interpretative and operative turn within urban design is undoubtedly Thomas Sieverts’ book Zwischenstadt, literally the city in-between, written in 1995- 1996 and published for the first time in 1997.1 This anti-conservative approach to urbanity seeks to demonstrate that the in-betweenness (between the historical centers and the unlimited land, between the inhabited places and the non-places of mobility, or between the temporality of local economy and the dependency of the global market) is not the source of all evil, but rather the celebration of the possible, uncertain and inciting. Based on his experience as one of the directors of the International Building Exhibition IBA Emscher Park between 1989 and 1994, Sieverts argues against the perpetuation of traditional images of sociability and of spatiality, built upon dualities such as city-territory, nature-culture, etc. The Zwischenstadt does not exist in opposition to another form of ecumene, but it emerges from its own spacing and temporizations, from the variance of its comprising elements. Thus, his examination of the Zwischenstadt begins with the reexamination of some core concepts like urbanity, centrality, density, diversity, and ecology. Translated into French, English (one in the UK and another one in the US), Japanese, and recently into Spanish, the book is still highly relevant today, inviting us to cherish the casual, and teaching us how to see and make sense of the new urban dynamics. Moreover, Sieverts’ capacity to capture the spirit of change has been highly valuable to the latest editions of Europan Europe, of which he was president until recently. Just as the Zwischenstadt helped mark a cultural and professional turn two decades ago, Europan 13 seems to be really marking a new inflection, not only in the way that we conceive of architectural and urban projects, but also in the methods that we use to make them happen. In the light of the topic of our current issue, Thomas Sieverts granted me the immense privilege of an interview that tells a little bit about who he is, how the concept and the theme of urbanity have informed his practice as an architect and urban planner, and how he regards it now. At the same time, I was interested in his oppinion on how the professions of architecture and urban design have changed over the past few decades, and how he experienced all those moments of change in his career.
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There is nothing more polysemic than the word urbanitas, which refers to urban life before characterizing the manners and language in their spiritual dimensions. From Cicero to Quintilian, the Vrbs structures an entire episteme and a body of knowledge about the city, which expands in the ethics as well as in the esthetics. However, when we inquire into the Roman architecture, it is easy to notice that it also reminds us of rhetoric, and that a stone building is always the conjugated fruit of invention, of disposition, and ornamentation. In other words, these notions find inspiration in one another, thus generating an implicit path between the City and language, only to arrive, via the architectural treatises, back to the City. This crisscross is the study object of the article. By taking a special interest in the Roman urbanity, this text aims to establish a working hypothesis: if the Ciceronian urbanitas was hostile to urbanism, Vitruvius is nonetheless the architect of their reconciliation.
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The ancient was palpable in early modern Rome. Recreated in visual and literary culture, the city of the emperors was traversed alongside that of the present. In an era of antique revival and cultural tourism, affinity with the city’s past became integral to the identity of Rome’s citizens and visitors. Yet in an environment where the artistic and literary evidence of monuments was more readily accessible than the physical, mistakes in identification were not uncommon. Using as a case study the Augustan era Ara Pacis Augustae, this article demonstrates that such inaccuracies were not unimportant. Disjunction of the intellectual record with a largely unknown site engineered a false memory of the monument. This created a subjective, yet potent, urban experience and practice. Disseminated in popular texts, inaccurate intellectual formation of urban artefacts impacted not only upon the ghosted ancient Rome, but also the early modern landscape. This article presents a new insight into the power of the historical lens to inform understanding and creation of the early modern city.
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The way Bucharest has been seen by Central and Western Europeans has always been important for the modern development of the city, especially since its character has for a long time been considered as having less of a town and more of a village. Likely, this peculiar opinion (together with other material conditions) has been at the basis of the apparent unconditional adoption of models and features specific to the Western standard, starting with the second half of the 19th century. The same opinion has also been shared by the inhabitants. This paper describes the evolution of two old streets in Bucharest, thus offering samples of the specific transformation undergone by the whole city from a spontaneous to a regulated type of development; it is a testimony to a nuanced process where partial adjustments simultaneously modernized the city without changing it completely and succeeded in shaping its own, genuine personality. The two case studies are based on larger researches meant to substantiate future interventions in the protected areas of the city; they approach the issue of the urban tissue as a feature of urbanity (the urban tissue being seen as the physical form taken by local urban culture). The case studies focus on the changes in urban fabric at the advent of modern planning, and on the manner these changes are mirrored in the urban image. This option is motivated not only by the fact that, usually, most of the judgments on a town are defined simply by the way in which it is seen, but also by the imminence of the moment, as Bucharest is once again about to change its looks, primarily on the account of real estate speculations tending to dramatically increase building density.
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The epicenter of all large-scale radical protests in modern Ukraine has been Kiev’s central square, called Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). Ten years ago, during the Orange Revolution of 2004, the Ukrainians stood their ground on the Maidan after a rigged election. The more recent events, which rallied the nation even more, have made Maidan a generic name synonymous with freedom and dignity.The architectural history of the place has played an important role in the formation of the Ukrainian national identity.National identity is the key component of any state’s national idea and the state itself. In architecture, features of identity manifest themselves in the formation of the main public spaces and the appearance of built-up areas. Urban spaces embody society’s values. This means that in the process of its development, it is essential to ensure the conservation of the city’s identity.This is why the main objective of Ukrainian society at the moment is to assert its own identity and create its own imagery. Therefore, public zones of the capital of a democratic country should be transformed to emphasize its democratic character and perform other socially important functions.The visual image of the Independence Square and the Maidan as a catchword have become a symbol of the just struggles of a nation and its self-identification process. Now it is up to architects to underscore its meaning with architectural means.
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For over a century, many American cities have turned their downtowns into derelict environments. These areas contain unique architectural features and have made huge investments in infrastructure that would be costly to recreate elsewhere. As a result, many organizations, individuals, and communities have tried to return historic downtowns to profitability by restoring their centers and preserving their city's heritage.This essay analyzes the different strategies and practices used to preserve the historical center of Savannah, Georgia. It is a colorful history that begins with the civil disobedience of seven feisty elderly women in the 1950s. Several years later, the city's core received designation as a National Historic Landmark. Eventually, Hollywood producers gave it a starring role in John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Each of these attempts to marry heritage with urban revitalization eventually lost its effectiveness and led to calls for further action. Savannah's most recent attempt to transform itself into a college town has been the most successful solution thus far. This article introduces each strategy as well as the people and motivations behind it, traces the impact of each strategy's application on the physical and social fabric of the city, evaluates the relative success of each strategy, and discusses their applicability for the rejuvenation of other cities.
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This paper would contribute to a definition of urbanity as a negotiated construction of heterotopia — an in-between space where place, community and language meet. In comparing narratives on spatial memory through the perspective of a language on the verge of extinction, my purpose is to highlight the link that native speakers may create between cityscape and community. I examine the media representations of urbanity and spatial alterity at the street level, in a multilingual setting, and in a physical environment that is severely constrained. I have gathered a coherent corpus of information on trans-linguistic urbanity, and selected a number of scenes on Macau’s heterotopia from Hollywood movies, public ads from colonial Hong Kong, Cantopop songs, and video clips in or on Patuá. Within this limited corpus, I have focused on instances of transition, and the mechanisms of parallelism and parody. This has led me to conclude that urbanity is a key element to understanding the significance of place in the relationship between dominant and subaltern languages and cultures.
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Cities have been shaped throughout the history by policies and behaviours that have developed from the relation with the other: the migrant, the beggar, the poor, the one different through skin colour, language, religious beliefs or everyday practices.This article will investigate in what way urban spatial transformation is related to the presence of the other. It advances the hypothesis that the other spaces (heterotopias in the line of definition that Foucault established in 1967, and which De Cauter and Dehaene have sharpened in 2008) have an established even historical function in the city which is that of mediating habitual conflicts between oikos – the private and agora – the public. But when those with ambiguous status, the other others – such as the Romanian Roma migrating to Berlin – use them for the negotiation of their condition and claims, these urban sites cave in under the complexity of the contradictions. We are witnessing the emergence of new types of spaces that function as loopholes, fragmented borders, exposed enclosures.Apart from posing a serious intellectual and functional challenge to both planners and users of the city, these spaces are an important indicator: they are the urban spatial manifestation of various scales of socio-political and economical conflicts. They can become new instruments to enquire and articulate knowledge about the city, while their ambiguous and conflictual nature could be explored for potential urban renewal.
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On October 30, 1975, in response to president Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail out New York City, the New York Daily News covered its front page with the now infamous headline, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” Reprivatizing the economy thus became the official answer to New York City’s fiscal disorder. However, the official answer did not stimulate contentment among New Yorkers who watched as their neighborhoods deteriorated and crime rates surged. Some of these New Yorkers sought reprieve in hardcore punk, a powerful new sound and style that began spreading across the U.S. in the late 1970s. Thus, while the city dropped dead, hardcore punk began rising from New York’s squats and attempted to construct a space detached from the influence of ineffectual city officials and inner-city violence. Through images, lyrics, fanzines, and local media, the author examines the intersection of hardcore punk and New York City. During the 1980s, New York City’s economic failure, subsequent decline in infrastructure, and increase in crime and drug abuse directly influenced a burgeoning hardcore scene. Hardcore sought to create an inclusive alternative to New York’s deteriorating streets and the dangers they presented. However, as a reaction to the streets it attempted to subvert, hardcore necessitated recognition of the city's structural challenges and thus fell prey to hypermasculine norms akin to those typified by the affliction of New York’s streets.
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The strong links (or even synonymy) between the concepts of “civil society” and “urbanity” have accompanied the history of the European city ever since Early Modernity; yet during the last decades of the 20th century the shift of focus from civil society to questions of governance have come to the forefront of public attention. My paper explores the relations between the Romanian post-socialist civil society and the gradual acknowledgement of an urban conscience, in relation to the controversial recent projects developed by the municipality of Bucharest. Timidly starting in the early 2000, this conscience has acquired more and more self-awareness since 2010. I look at the context defined by radical urban changes combined with the growth of an educated, western-oriented, middle-class in search of identity. The rise of this new urban generation has triggered a new attitude towards the destiny of the city, as well as an unprecedented series of street movements dedicated to urban issues (2011 -2013). The paper examines the extent, intensity and character of these processes, trying to map the associations between the social and political origins of these movements and the urban issues at stake.
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The post-socialist urban restructuring of Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, has been characterized by substantial changes in the city’s built tissue, which in the housing sector were manifested through the marginalization of the neighborhood structure, segregation of the housing stock and intensification of building activities in the city’s periphery. As a result, the uneven transformation of the city was followed with changing perspectives of urbanity that are still present at city level.This research deals with the transformation of the built fabric in the city of Skopje, which will be studied at a neighborhood level. Specifically, we will provide a comparative overview of two neighborhoods in Skopje, which were built during and following the socialist period. We will analyze patterns of residential divergence due to different organizational systems of the state and explore the dissimilarities in urban experiences, practices and forms of spatiality.We will finally argue that the housing neighborhoods in Skopje built both throughout the period of socialism and after do not only bring significant changes in the way we understand the city, but they also constitute a clear evidence of the transformed meaning of space and place, a theme of critical importance in urban studies.
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The urban design practices of the past few decades have relied almost entirely on generic desires, projects and tools. With the globalization of urban visions and behaviours, it seems that authentically local specificities persist and thrive sometimes more in those cities which still rely in one way or another on unplanned processes. Such is the case of most Bucharest city.Both the concept of urbanity and the behaviour it infers towards the other, the collective and the city itself seem to compete with the type of local spontaneous urban practices specific to informal urbanism. Born from the need to cope with the (post)communist condition, these improvised, diverse and very lively practices seem to denote a divergent culture.But are these spontaneous behaviours the only ways of coping with both the past and the present in the here and now? Or are they also the emerging signs of a new vernacular, of a new tradition that is, of a culture that shifts over time to result eventually in more coherent behaviours? Is the bricoleur – the main actor of this spontaneous city – introducing a local blend of urbanity and should this alternative path be repressed, ignored or included in the way we think of our cities today and in the future?
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Claiming the need for constant and critical account of the gestures that shape the urban space, the article puts forth a series of Romanian contemporary urbanity realities and general precepts. This permanent questioning is described as a pedagogical learning method, a sine qua non condition for honest comprehension and progress. While “learning from others” means choosing, adjusting and applying foreign models, “learning from ourselves” is an in-house much more intricate trial and error practice, as it deals with the acceptance of failure. Throughout the text, several local urban practices are compared to the Baukultur, a type of necessary planning instrument, that combines design standards with holistic social, environmental, economic visions; through this lens and using several examples, problems of regulations (as not flexible and open ended), participation, decision making (a process lead by politicians with a facultative input by professionals) and finally development are disclosed. Rounding off that urban development is nothing but a continuous learning process, a list of possible matters we can learn from ourselves is provided in the end.
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With the Palestinian Museum opening in May this year and the recently successful fundraising campaign for Faheem Majeed and Jeremiah Hulsebros-Spofford’s Floating Museum in Chicago, it would be tempting to suggest that we are entering a new praxis of the marginal in the museum. A hallowed place once reserved for the cultural élite, the concept of the museum has a history embedded in imperialist gains and repressed losses. Often intimidating, the problems of access, interpretation and representation in museums trouble architects, curators and exhibition designers alike. To what extent must the typology of a museum building both reflect and enable the marginal artefacts contained within? How can you design a functioning museum without producing something that enhances its ideologies? Is it possible to design a museum of the margins or is the term “museum” too loaded? Can the concept of “museum” be more flexible in order to keep up with the cultural world as it is now? Perhaps we need to move beyond the museum; perhaps the museum itself is dead.
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The first attempts at defining what was perceived in the 19th century as a “Romanian” architectural style and at creating a national architectural heritage had at the forefront the 16th century monastery of Curtea de Argeș. Its 19th century discovery in the first modern architectural studies, its display in world exhibitions and finally its restoration illustrate how old monuments in Romania came to be used as proof and visual illustration of the country’s national history and thus as symbols of the new state. The paper aims to show that architecture gradually came to prominence in the process of nation-building through the example of Curtea de Argeș and, at the same time aims, to draw a new light on the way in which national ideologies are constructed. The example of the architectural heritage reveals a dual impetus from both local and foreign actors, events or publications, proving how national histories and ideologies are constructed at the borderline between foreign ideas and actors, on the one hand, and local decision-makers, on the other. The paper looks at Curtea de Argeș monastery as the central subject to a number of events and publications from mid to late 19th century. It starts with the first art history study on an artwork from Romania, the volume on Curtea de Argeș by the Habsburg scholar Ludwig Reissenberger. Reissenberger’s work raised awareness of the architectural heritage, stirred debates and responses from the Romanian intellectuals like, for instance, the writings on architecture of Dimitrie Berindei and Alexandru Odobescu. All these three works have only been briefly mentioned in the literature and are for the first time considered at length. The next part culminates with the display of Curtea de Argeș at the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition where for the first time the monument stood as a symbol of the new Romanian state. In the final chapter the paper looks at the long but lavish restoration of Curtea de Argeș. Carried out between 1875-1886 by the French architect Andre Lecomte du Noüy, it marked the moment when the monastery became the landmark of the new Romanian state. The paper concludes at the end of the 19th century when the Romanian architectural heritage began to take shape and fulfil its role as support for the national narrative and basis for the future National Style in architecture. Overall, the architectural heritage emergences at the crossroads of foreign and local inputs, involving writings, exhibitions, restorations and research, all focused around Curtea de Argeș Monastery.
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This paper has two aims. The first is to investigate the notion of margins and its relevance to architectural discourse. The second is to cast a new perspective on the 1960s Romanian architecture by using the same concept. Margins are considered as both an instrument and an object of study. Margins are a versatile notion. They send to marginality, the way post-modern cultural theory addressed the concept, but they can also have meanings such as margins of quest, margins of error, or edges. The paper re-reads the architectural discourse in 1960s Romania through the lens of this variable notion. In spite of the relative freedom that characterized the period, this discourse evolved in the margin of the political power’s discourse. By comparatively analysing two architects, Nicolae Porumbescu and Mircea Alifanti and the different use they made of their marginal condition – strong and weak, respectively –, the paper investigates how margins can give a critical potential to discourses that are not ones of opposition.
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