The School of Architecture Syracuse University in Florence

and Osservatorio sull’Architettura - Fondazione Targetti

in collaboration with Istituto degli Innocenti presents:

Civic Space in Scattered Cities

Curated by Pino Brugellis, Lawrence Davis, Richard Ingersoll

Florence, March 25, 2009

Salone Brunelleschi, Istituto degli Innocenti

Piazza Santissima Annunziata, Firenze

The vast majority of contemporary urban growth occurs as low-density sprawl over large tracts of quasi-rural landscape. It has been encouraged by deregulated global capitalism and relaxed government policies feeding the production and consumption of private housing, commercial, retail, and leisure space. Such scattered development does not correspond to the set of traditional center-periphery urban relationships. On the contrary, it creates a new tabula rasa of lifestyle development spread thinly over the landscape in ways that often seem to be indifferent to geographic boundaries or cultural identities. The diffused patterns of urbanism have yielded an organization of everyday life, typically based on automobile transportation and electronic communication, encouraging the insular social existence of its inhabitants. Assessing the status of collective identity and the resulting forms of civic space in this low-density super city is essential for the making culturally sensitive and realistic interventions in the public realm. This is the main concern of this year’s Syracuse / Targetti  Symposium. 

The discourse about civic space in scattered cities needs urgent attention. The lack of cultural spaces that serve the complexity of sprawl presents one of the most challenging yet least considered problems in social management and design.  It is as common in Europe as in the US, and indeed anywhere where there has been rapid development. To return to a previous era’s sense of the public realm does not always address the new sense of civic life in the context of changing social structures and the evolution of the low concentration contemporary city. At the center of this opportunity of creating the new forms of public realm is a need to understand and draw closer together global economic and social systems with more intimate yet contemporary forms of identity making in the built environment.

The Syracuse  / Targetti  Symposium “Civic Space in Scattered Cities” intends to debate the possibilities for generating civic identity in the sprawl of contemporary Europe.  Three architects and urbanists will introduce projects and strategies for public space for areas where it is frequently absent. The discussion of these works and the ensuing round table debate will focus on strategies for meeting this challenge optimistically, seeing the scattered city as an architectural, urban, and philosophical opportunity.

Biographies

Winy Maas (1959, Schijndel, The Netherlands) is one of the co-founding directors of MVRDV. He received a degree in Landscape Architecture from the RHSTL Boskoop in 1983. In 1990, he graduated from the Technical University of Delft with a degree in Architecture and Urbanism.

He recently was installed as official city architect of Almere, Netherland to develop a vision for the Dutch boom town. Other current projects include a masterplan for Greater Paris, a mixed-use development in Tirana, Albania, a bank’s headquarters building in Oslo, the headquarters for the Swiss national television station in Zürich and a market hall in Rotterdam.

He lectures and teaches throughout the world and takes part in international juries. He currently is visiting professor of architectural design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is professor in architecture and urban design at the faculty of architecture, Delft University of Technology. He is director of the Why Factory, a research institute for the future city he founded in 2008 which is connected to the Delft School of Design.

Teddy Cruz has been recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar for their research and work on housing and its relationship to alternative land use policies, modes of sociability and economic processes. He obtained a Masters in Design Studies from Harvard University and the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome.  In 2004-05 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize, by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics and he is currently an associate professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD in San Diego.

Margaret Crawford is a professor of Urban Planning and Design Theory at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University. She received a PhD from the Urban Planning Program at UCLA, an MA from Harvard, attended the Architecural Association in London and received a BA from UC Berkeley. She has also taught at Sci-Arc in Los Angeles and the Facolta di Architettura, Universita’ degli Studi di Firenze.

Her principal area of research and writing is focused on the nature and status of public space in the contemporary built environment. Her writings include important articles and book contributions on such topics as “suburban life and public space”, the work of shopping mall architect John Jerde “The Architect and the Mall,” and the widely read article “The World in a Shopping Mall.” She has earned numerous grants and awards including most recently a Guggenhiem Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and a Grant from the Graham Foundation. She has lectured widely from China to the Netherlands at the Berlage Institute and in the US at Princeton, MIT and UC Berkeley. She has been a principal editor for the journal Everyday Urbanism, as well as a contributor to AD, Casabella, Perspecta, Bauen Werk and Wohnen, and The Harvard Design Magazine.

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E-mail: osservatorioarchitettura@targetti.it