Tracks

Pedro Janeiro (FA Ulisboa)

Mariko Takagi (DWC Kyoto)

Until mid. 20th century, ordinary people were dependent on the travelogues of poets, writers, artists, and explorers. Their texts and images allowed a glimpse into foreign, exotic, and almost unreachable places. Each report was created through a frame of reference; whether it was based on colonial ambitions (Marco Polo), cultural-political reflections (Heinrich Heine on Germany and France), philosophical reflections (Goethe's Grand Tour in Italy), drawing and painting studies (Delacroix in Morocco), architectural studies through drawings and writings (Le Corbusier's journey to Italy) or more recently, semiotic theories(Roland Barthes on Japan). Those reports still affect our imagination of foreign cultures and cities. Living in the 21st century, we have even obtained tools to visit a city virtually (e.g. by google maps) without even touching the ground.

The way how we explore a city physically, or digitally, lets us develop our personal map, picturing the city based on our personal interest.

This track will be dedicated to projects in research and practice, focusing on visual explorations of city streets.

Contributions, looking at the research topic city streets from an interdisciplinary angle e.g. communication design, information design, visual art, illustration, music, semiotics, and perceptual psychology among others, are all welcome.

David Vale (FA Ulisboa)

Manfred Wacker (Ustuttgart)

One of the main purposes of streets is to enable movement of people and goods. Especially in dense urban areas this function creates conflicts with other functions of urban streets. Since the available urban space is limited, we can additionally observe conflicts between passenger and goods transport as well as in-between the different means of transport. Nowadays, with the emerging of several new transport modes, street mobility is becoming increasingly diverse, and streets have to accommodate pedestrians, cyclists, public transport, cars, trucks, but also micro-mobility modes. Additional autonomous vehicles might appear soon along our streets.

In this track we address these conflicting requirements, and we are looking for solutions. To which extend can we accept an overlapping of the several requirements and functions, to which extend do they have to be separated? How will future streets look like?

We welcome papers that focus on the current and future street mobility, either addressing the street as the focus or the entire street network. Several disciplines are welcome, ranging from connectivity and/or accessibility studies, urban geography, urban design, studies of the perception of individuals, discourses on street mobility, etc.

José Nuno Beirão (FA Ulisboa)

Joanna Saad-Sulonen (IT University of Copenhagen) / Christine Mady (RC-FAAD NDU)

This track aims to bring together experts that use different methodologies and tools for investigating streets in various aspects and contexts, and who are interested in exploring possibilities for transdisciplinary approaches. We welcome contributions addressing ethnographic and visual exploration of the spaces, economies and cultures of ‘city streets’, including contributions that bring forward methodological challenges in researching contemporary streets as well as the streets of the future. These challenges may address researching streets in a ‘glocal’ context: from very local, small scale studies to larger comparative studies at the global level, and any combination of these. Other challenges may tackle the role of the wide range of digital technologies available for researching streets and how to deal with the abundance of tools at hand, ranging from researcher-driven GIS methods to citizen-driven explorations in documentation, mapping, and analysis of the urban context. We also welcome diversity in the timeframe of studies: from the short-term to longitudinal studies, as well as contributions highlighting interdisciplinary research tools and methods across urban planning, design, transport planning, ICT, e-planning, architecture, public space cognition, social and environmental sciences, urban geographies, real estate, GIS, City Information Modelling (CIM), surveying and remote sensing, and more.

Alessia Allegri (FA Ulisboa)

Paola Somma (IUAV Retired)

City streets are a tangible place of representation (through architectural order, monuments and symbols, commemorative sites, street names, or the simple physical and associative traces left by interweaving patterns of everyday life), assigned with intangible values. They contain and exhibit multiple overwritten stories and memories, changing over time and according to different societies and cultures.

Moreover, city streets are defined by increasingly complex social, spatial and temporal relations, characterized by conditions of change and uncertainty, harmony and disruption, exceptions, successions, etc. They generate rhythms that interact and mingle, adjusting to each other, and originating polyrhythmic fields, compound of several everyday life and spatial patterns.

Track XX reflects on the ambiguous notion of collective memory and on the different significance of the multiple rhythms that animate the street, on the following questions:

1. How do streets serve as the spatial framework for the construction of the collective memory?

2. How might we theorize and historicize contemporary streets as sites of memory?

3. How the rhythmic and polyrhythmic nature of everyday urban life molds spaces and re-create spatial articulations?

4. Are the urban rhythms transient or might they represent an enduring influence on the form of the street/city?

João Rafael Santos (FA Ulisboa)

Alessandro Armando (PoliTo)

The track is aimed at bridging and intersecting multiple disciplinary contributions on the adaptation of streets, including urbanism, architecture, landscape architecture, artistic and cultural studies, engineering and social sciences. Street adaptation is a complex and challenging process which requires systematic description and interpretation of their role in multiple scales and in the face of new (and not so new) needs. Whether in old streets or newer linear infrastructures, this process requires the integration of sectoral claims, temporary initiatives, and technical innovations to design spatially and culturally coherent public space.

Contributions addressing some of the following topics and based on specific case studies of past and ongoing processes of urban streets transformation would be more than welcome.

1. Streets as adaptable spaces, changing with the city, meeting new needs and demands, integrating new systems, infrastructures and architectural elements. The notion of adaptation should be stressed and discussed, considering its different implications: adaptation as a coherent effect, compliant with a program (of functions, strategy etc.); adaptation as a collateral effect, emerging from a constellation of contingent actions (ex-aptation).

2. Streets as socio-technical spaces where an ever-evolving tension between public and private claims, conflicts and opportunities unfold. The street could be the most evident reference of a broader entanglement, made of institutional acts, social and material infrastructures, contracts, policies, spatial practices, which need to be mapped and organized into a perspective, in order to become a project.

3. Streets as spaces of persistence, memory, identity: a framing structure, working at many scales, from the neighborhood to the territory. This points to the diversity of streets in multiple urban and territorial contexts, an opportunity to shape, structure and qualify and contemporary landscape.

Sérgio Fernandes (FA Ulisboa) / Sérgio Proença (FA Ulisboa)

Alenka Fikfak (FA Uljubljana)

The street is more than just a »road« surrounded by buildings intended for non-transit traffic by motor vehicles and/or pedestrians and cyclists. The character of the street is influenced by elements of the urban form they co-design, but mainly by users and their movement in the space. It reflects the quality of life, by continuing a dialogue with history, identity of places, including the built environment.

The streets are, more broadly, the public and democratic space of the city. The tension between public and private can be observed in historical European cities, where the streets and urban spaces are gradually threatened by structures and temporary constructions (privately owned). If we derive from the role and concept of identity and diversity of morphological patterns, then the street pattern is not necessarily in itself just a recognition of the morphological structure.

The shape of the street can be analysed as conflicting quality elements such as: flat or curved, long or short, wide or narrow, closed or open, formal or informal, but it is also a question of public space, according urban infrastructure and place identity, as well, urban design and city composition. What will be the street of tomorrow? A re-interpretation of motive ‘road vs. street’ as a new non-motorized lifeblood of a society with a new urban form, or it needs just some music, people, joining the public space as 'Dancing on the street' (Bowie, Jagger, 1985)?