Culture hungers: new appetites for contemporary cities

dc.contributor.authorMaioli, Serena
dc.date.accessioned2024-05-28T10:31:49Z
dc.date.available2024-05-28T10:31:49Z
dc.date.issued2014en
dc.descriptionArchitecture & Planning in Times of Scarcity : Reclaiming the Possibility of Making. 3rd AESOP European Urban Summer School 2012, Manchesteren
dc.description.abstractDysfunctional abundance. The city is an egg (Price, 1961). The ancient city, hemmed in the physical line of the walls and made up of an historical core, is a boiled egg: we are able to distinguish the borders and its density. During the centuries of industrialization and demographic boom, the city begins to develop itself beyond the walls, taking the form of a fried egg: the periphery is born. The city centre, up to now solid on the core, loses its magnetic force and infects itself with an urban magma which floods everything dissolving hierarchies: the modern city become scrambled.Despite Price’s model, our cities entered a new phase, one in which growth and the blending of centres and periphery brings about a new phenomenon of erosion and blurring: it causes the emptying of entire urban parts, towards a porous islands’ city model (Ungers, 1977). We are living in redundant spaces, unfinished or unplanned, revealing a stopped growing process: we are talking about vacant spaces or, more often, completed spaces with function but without sense. We can define those spaces ‘urban lacunas’; they are protagonists in the loss of meaning of the whole work which is the city. Is abandonment a symptom of crisis or the result of a natural selection? We cannot continue categorizing shrinkage as a contemporary wound or a sign of decline; rather, we have to admit it is the expression of latent social behaviours and economic trends which bring us to reconsider quantity and quality of the space. The emptying scenario is a topic in the debate among local community and hyper-community (political and economic), two opposite fronts both for aims and kind of space use.To understand the reasons of shrinkage we have to observe how people meet, how they eat, what they buy, how long they live in public space or in private: substantially, it’s time to study the culture space capable of synthesizing the identity of a bigger de-territorialized community.
dc.identifier.isbn978-0-9927823-1-3en
dc.identifier.pageNumber108-116
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/1630
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherSoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHPen
dc.rightsopenAccessen
dc.rights.licenseAll Rights Reserveden
dc.sourceArchitecture & Planning in Times of Scarcity : Reclaiming the Possibility of Making. 3rd AESOP European Urban Summer School 2012, Manchesteren
dc.titleCulture hungers: new appetites for contemporary cities
dc.typeconferenceObjecten
dc.type.versionpublishedVersionen
Files
Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Name:
2012_EUSS_108-116.pdf
Size:
159.11 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
1.71 KB
Format:
Item-specific license agreed to upon submission
Description: