AMBIVALENT LANDSCAPES, Sorting out the present by designing the future

Public Spaces & Urban Cultures Conference

Lisbon, 6th -7th December 2012

Ambivalence stands for the simultaneously contradictory and opposing perception of a given phenomenon, which despite disorienting in its manifestations, may be regarded as a condition from which to build renewed frameworks of analysis and criticism.

Recent trends in spatial, social and cultural processes show a growing sense of this ambivalence – in the coexisting patterns of spatial polarization and shrinkage, in the informal public spaces patched under recombining networks of individual and collective exchange, in the increasingly difficult access to social and physical infrastructures that (used to) support modern cities. These are the landscapes of a changing urban Europe. No longer confined to the City but ever more dependent on stronger spaces of citizenship.

Ambivalent landscapes are the common ground and the opportunity to address public space and urban culture in the face of an open and transdisciplinary perspective.

This is an invitation to scholars to participate with original papers on a multiple disciplinary basis – architecture and urbanism, social sciences and landscape, design and technology. Three trackswere designed to bringing together different approaches into a shared topic: Empty Cities, Collective spaces, Living infrastructures.