Experimenting with Urban Narratives: A Colloquium

Creativity, Sustainability and Challenges presented by Cities in the 21st Century

Organisers:
Simon Green (Hurd Rolland Partnership Architects), Stephanie Koerner (University of Manchester) and Sally Stone (Manchester School of Architecture)

Thursday May 13, 2010
10.30 AM – 16.30 PM
MMU, Chatham Building, Lecture Theatre 304

Thursday May 13, 2010
18 – 21 PM
CUBE Gallery Film Screening and Round Table


In a time when some say that “we can almost no longer assume that anything can be assumed” (Sloderdijk 2005), few fields are likely to face more difficult challenges than architecture, urban design, and associated creative industries. Writing on these challenges in her proposal of fresh orientations towards the roles of these fields in contemporary society, Leoni Sandercock (Cosmopolis II 2003) stresses such socio-cultural factors reshaping cities and regions as:


uncertainties about climate change, instrumental employments of technologies that can and have resulted in reducing biodiversity as well as major human and ecological catastrophes, and about how best to contribute to sustainable development,

unresolved postcolonial conditions, the rise of civil society, and the new politics of social movements

international migration and ‘multi-cultural citizenship’,

diverging visions of for and by whom cities, their surroundings and their relationships to other cities (often very far away) have been and are nowadays being designed.



The aims of this colloquium are to explore:

the emergence of cities of difference in contexts of globalisation, ecological uncertainties and other, related, social forces,

challenges that what some might call “mongrel cities” present to city based professions, to city dwellers, and to conventional notions of shared histories and aspirations for the future,

contributions that architecture, urban design, creative industries, and cultural and educational institutions can make to widening the range of creative and sustainable means to address

questions of how we - in all of our differences can be at home in the 21st century’s complex and changing cities,

the importance of collaboration of urban design based professions, interdisciplinary scholarship and student communities to such explorations.


The colloquium will conclude with a showing of films made for the Colloquium by msa students at the CUBE gallery.