Italian Urbanism Under Fascism

Here's some information on an upcoming conference at Columbia Unversity.

Polis and Politics: Italian Urbanism under Fascism
The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University
27-28 April 2007

The event will feature eleven presentations on interwar Italian urbanism, including a talk by Italian Consul General Antonio Bandini and a keynote address by Maristella Casciato of the University of Bologna. The conference is co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Department of Art History, and is organized by doctoral students Andrew Manson, Lucy Maulsby and David Rifkind.

In Fascist Italy the urban environment served as a critical cultural reference from which artists, architects, politicians, and planners sought to fashion a new Italy. This conference asks the question of why the city exerted such a powerful influence over contemporary artistic practice and what were the consequences. While scholars have documented many of the major urban interventions in cities such as Rome and considerable attention has been given to the new towns founded by Mussolini, recently historians begun to look at other models and examples that enrich and complicate our understanding of Fascism’s interest in cities and towns.