The City and Complexity – Life, Design and Commerce in the Built
Environment
City, University of London
Dates: 17-19th June 2020
2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Jane Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities.
It came a decade after her seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, and heralded a new age in thinking about the city. The city would no
longer be a question of design and planning in isolation. From the early 1970s
onwards, it would be seen as a complex interdisciplinary phenomenon.
The first years of the 1970s saw the introduction of a whole series of
notions that would mutually inform our reading of the metropolis: social
justice and the city, sustainability, defensible space, and urban centres as
sites of public health. It saw the emergence of concepts such as the global
city, urban economics, the post-industrial society and the cultural city. From
art, design and cultural perspectives, post-modernism would critique of the
whole modernist project.
Five decades after complexity theory was first applied to our reading of
the city, this conference revisits its consequences. It reconsiders the city as
an adaptive, self-organising and unpredictable system of interconnecting
interventions, forces and perspectives. It asks how these competing and
mutually reinforcing factors came into play and how they operate today. It
questions how the city has been, and continues to be, informed by the practices
of multiple disciplines.
Context:
Today, ideas like the ‘business cluster’ are well established tenets of
geographical economics. Research agencies prioritise place-based approaches to
economic growth as a matter of course. Architects such as Rem Koolhaas and
Patrik Schumacher embrace the chaos of the Neoliberal city. Others such as
Teddy Cruz emphasise housing, community activism and social responsibility.
Engineers offer technical solutions to environmental design while the Rockefeller
Foundation has highlighted city resilience. The United Nations has argued that
‘while cities bring opportunities, they also foster health epidemics’.
In this complex scenario nothing is isolated. New Urbanism can be
analysed using space syntax. The walkable city can be aligned with Transport
Orientated Development. Designers can be commissioned as tools of economic
regeneration. Housing can be linked to financial crisis. The artistic and
cultural heritage of our cities can become touristic futures. Health concerns
can dictate urban design and regional planning.
This complexity has historical roots. By the early 1970s, spatial
relationships had been fully embedded into financial theory. The city as a
spatio-economic phenomena had been linked to ‘the right to the city’. Art and
design had been fully commodified. The demolition of the Pruitt Igoe housing
complex had been identified as the moment of modernism’s death. The
Environmental Protection Agency had been set up. Sustainable design was on the
agenda and, within a decade, the UN Healthy Cities initiative would be
operative globally.
Some 50 years after the introduction of complexity theory and the
establishment of the city as an interdisciplinary entity, this conference asks
where are we now in our understanding of the city as an integrated phenomenon.
Themes:
Seeing the urban phenomenon as not reducible to single issues, this
conference asks you to bring your disciplinary expertise to a forum examining
the city through the lens of complexity theory – as inevitably fragmented but
simultaneously interconnected and changing. As such it welcomes contributions
on the following strands (click for details):
- Urban Design | Architecture | Interiors | Landscape
- Engineering | Infrastructure | Sustainability
- Housing | Sociology | Human Geography | Public Health
- Economics | Business | City Management | Government Policy and Planning
- Cultural Studies | Art History | Social History
Abstracts: 1st December 2019
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