The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

Critical reflection on urban imaginaries have lately proliferated, stimulated by the centrality that images of smart, green, sustainable, healthy, creative, liveable, resilient (etc.) city increasingly play in urban politics. For the most part, however, the potential the concept holds has remained unexpressed, its meaning all too often overlapped with that of ideology. The result has been that of assuming imaginaries as shared, consensual and homogeneous representations which are abstractly superimposed onto the real. Contrary to this dichotomous understanding, urban imaginaries are far more complex, fragmented, and heterogeneous compositions, shaped by conflicting temporalities, aesthetics, and politics. Attending to this complexity requires to deploy conceptual and methodological creativity in context.

The first panel of this session on Urban Imaginaries puts together contributions that explore the way given urban imaginaries emerge, crystallise, and are contested, through specific urban spaces, relations, and cultures. In particular, the four presentations will be inspired by the following questions: what are the aesthetic forms through which a urban imaginary is constructed, communicated, experienced and lived? What are the conflicting and contradictory dynamics through which it crystallises and reifies in the city, it is accepted, reproduced, or contested? What processes of valorisation and de-valorisation unfold around it? what are the temporalities that compose it? What methodologies can be deployed to grasp their spectral absence, frictions, actualisation, or multiple temporalities, and what styles can be deployed to convey them?

Non-Presenting Participants