The Resistance of Collective Memory: Historic Urban Landscape under [De/Con]struction
Lesslie Herrera – Dir. Yves Pedrazzini
Within the current urban condition, the role of heritage has become crucial to sustainable urban development. Interest in heritage is rapidly growing among experts and laymen, but new threats are emerging from conservation practices themselves to larger economic, political and ecological crises. In order to meet these challenges, ways of thinking about conservation have dramatically evolved over the last decades. The UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (2011) is one of the most notable emerged approaches. Since its introduction, this concept has been debated in regards of its capacity for implementation, specifically it questions its ability to include the plurality of memories.
The main objective of this research is to assess the potential and limits of the “Historic Urban Landscape”, from the perspective of the social-spatial construction of collective memory spaces, focusing in controversies and on processes of memory resistance as popular reactions to change. Combining methods from urban sociology, social psychology, architectural theory and visual modelling, I will map collective perceptions of space in order to identify different types of memorial territories in the Historic Center of Mexico City and the Historic Neighborhood of “El Cabanyal” of Valencia City.
Violence of urbanization: the case of Chennai (India) (titre provisoire)
Salomé Houllier – Dir. Yves Pedrazzini
Contemporary urbanism, as a science and an ideology, induces a violence of urbanization. This is usually done in the name of a formal planning of the territory at the expense of informal settlements. The latter resist this formalization and their scheduled deletion, sometimes using themselves violence. In some cases this confrontation overcomes the duality between formal and informal and produces hybrid structures, objects, details, leading towards a new urbanism: cities are henceforth built by architectural, urban, territorial and social hybridization. This process creates an innovative and critical approach of the modern models of formal urbanization that seem to hound against the inhabitants of informal settlements, causing resistance movements.
Using urban theories and interdisciplinary research methods such as ethnography, sociology, architecture and urban planning, we intend to analyze architectural, urban and territorial hybrid cases of popular occupation and thus of re-urbanization of land and buildings in Chennai (India).
Violence of urbanization: the case of Caracas (Venezuela) and Guangzhou (China) (titre provisoire)
Caroline Iorio – Dir. Yves Pedrazzini
Contemporary urbanism, as a science and an ideology, induces a violence of urbanization. This is usually done in the name of a formal planning of the territory at the expense of informal settlements. The latter resist this formalization and their scheduled deletion, sometimes using themselves violence. In some cases this confrontation overcomes the duality between formal and informal and produces hybrid structures, objects, details, leading towards a new urbanism: cities are henceforth built by architectural, urban, territorial and social hybridization. This process creates an innovative and critical approach of the modern models of formal urbanization that seem to hound against the inhabitants of informal settlements, causing resistance movements.
Using urban theories and interdisciplinary research methods such as ethnography, sociology, architecture and urban planning, we intend to analyze architectural, urban and territorial hybrid cases of popular occupation and thus of re-urbanization of land and buildings in Caracas (Venezuela) and Guangzhou (China).
Analysis of the relevance of urban cable transportation systems: comparison between Switzerland and Brazil
Fernando Simas – Dir. Prof. Vincent Kaufmann, Prof. Inès Lamunière
Could cable transportation systems fundamentally transform urban mobility in Europe? For years, Latin America has been innovative in the urban transportation field. More recently, urban aerial cable cars were developed to improve urban mobility in many South American cities. This diffusion of urban cableways takes place in a context of transformation for urban mobility in Europe: comfort and quality of time in public transport modes nowadays are gaining importance in public interest, meanwhile, the use of cars decreases in many cities. Related to these transformations, urban cable transportation systems evoke an important concept: they renew displacement experience by providing a scenic journey above the city and allow a point to point infrastructure that is completely free from streets geometry. These enable new opportunities to link urbanization with public transportation infrastructures.