conversations
StadsSalonUrbains #15: The City As Practice
How do I register?
Attendance is free, but please register using the following link: http://goo.gl/forms/ifkUeFnFri
A lecture by Isabelle Doucet (University of Manchester) on architecture between the Iconic and the Mundane
Brussels, a complex city with a turbulent architectural and urban past, forms a compelling case for examining the tensions between urban politics, architectural imaginations, society’s needs and desires, and a city’s history and fabric. Drawing from her book The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968 (Ashgate, 2015), Isabelle Doucet will ask: What is to be included in the discussions on architecture and the city? Through the study of a series of actions, which occurred in Brussels since 1968 (such as counter-projects, neighbourhood contracts, and urban activism), Brussels’ architectural production emerges as a tangle of ‘troubled’ histories, ideologies, participatory efforts, urban traumas, plans, projects, and mundane everyday constructions. How can this tangle of actors trigger novel readings of Brussels, and how can it inform also the imagination of Brussels’ future?
One-year anniversary Brussels Centre for Urban Studies
The lecture will be followed by an informal reception to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies. In this one year, a lot has happened: more than 20 VUB research groups and more than 200 researchers are now members of the Centre, we welcomed five international research fellows to spend a few months in Brussels and to work together with VUB research groups, and we organized various urban studies workshops and lectures.
2016 will see a continuation of these activities as well as the initiation of new initiatives: most importantly, the civil society fellowship programme that will support various collaborative projects between VUB researchers and civil society actors and organizations in Brussels.
What is the programme?
17.30: welcome by Paul De Knop, rector of the VUB (tbc)
17.40: introduction by Bas van Heur and Stefan De Corte, Brussels Centre for Urban Studies
18.00: lecture by Isabelle Doucet, University of Manchester
19.30: reception
