Agency/Agents of Urbanity Colloquium
Event details
| Date | 01.02.2015 › 01.03.2015 |
| Category | Call for proposal |
The PhD colloquium, Agency/Agents of Urbanity, to be held in 2015 from June 1st to June 3rd at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland asks for contributions that shed light on one or several agents of urbanity. Abstracts of 500 words are to be submitted to [email protected] by March 1st 2015 using the template provided at http://contour.epfl.ch/en/formats/
Contributions can be anywhere from the empirical to the philosophical, but should address one or several of the following themes:
Thinking Urbanity Materially and Agentially: What theoretical tools exist to help address the elusive nature of urbanity? How can we think urbanity in a way that avoids reducing our investigations to purely social or spatial categories and interactions? How do we do justice to the material aspects of urbanity—from the agency of urban morphology to that of the seemingly ‘non-material’ (more ephemeral) practices that promote or preclude urbanity’s existence? What is the place of non-human agency in urbanity
The Performative Ontology of Urbanity: What is the performative and emergent nature of urbanity? Who and what participates as agents in its production and what is the nature of this participation? What are the meaningful actions that contribute to urbanity? How and at which scales do the interactions between agents occur? How does the definition of urbanity (un)intentionally imply ‘non-urbanity’ and who or what precludes the possibility of urbanity’s coming-into-being?
Facilitating Urbanity: What agencies are at stake in facilitating the emergence of urbanity? How can we measure urbanity or the potential of a place to support its emergence? Are there certain elements of the social and physical environments that are particularly important and how can we imagine their enrollment as agents within urbanity-enabling practices?
Participants should be current PhD students or have completed their PhD in the last five years.
Contributions can be anywhere from the empirical to the philosophical, but should address one or several of the following themes:
Thinking Urbanity Materially and Agentially: What theoretical tools exist to help address the elusive nature of urbanity? How can we think urbanity in a way that avoids reducing our investigations to purely social or spatial categories and interactions? How do we do justice to the material aspects of urbanity—from the agency of urban morphology to that of the seemingly ‘non-material’ (more ephemeral) practices that promote or preclude urbanity’s existence? What is the place of non-human agency in urbanity
The Performative Ontology of Urbanity: What is the performative and emergent nature of urbanity? Who and what participates as agents in its production and what is the nature of this participation? What are the meaningful actions that contribute to urbanity? How and at which scales do the interactions between agents occur? How does the definition of urbanity (un)intentionally imply ‘non-urbanity’ and who or what precludes the possibility of urbanity’s coming-into-being?
Facilitating Urbanity: What agencies are at stake in facilitating the emergence of urbanity? How can we measure urbanity or the potential of a place to support its emergence? Are there certain elements of the social and physical environments that are particularly important and how can we imagine their enrollment as agents within urbanity-enabling practices?
Participants should be current PhD students or have completed their PhD in the last five years.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- Michael R. Doyle, PhD candidate, Architecture and the Sciences of the City, Laboratory for Urban and Environmental Economics (LEURE), EPFL.
Dario Negueruela del Castillo, PhD candidate, Architecture and the Sciences of the City, Atelier de la conception de l’espace/ ALICE Laboratory, EPFL.