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Department of Architecture

 

Professor Ali Madanipour (Professor of Urban Design and the Director of Global Urban Research Unit (GURU), School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University)

Abstract: This talk explores temporary urbanism through three interrelated dimensions. A temporary state may fill the gaps, offering interim and multiple use of space, particularly during the periods of economic slowdown; or more actively become a catalyst for change, facilitating experimentation, innovation or animation, which can provide a stepping stone to more stable arrangements. Alternatively, a temporary state may act as a critique of status quo, questioning the fixed identities and arrangements, which could offer new choices, as exemplified in responses to master planning. A temporary state may even become a permanent state, a destination in itself, a way of being, which reflects the speed of change and the precariousness and transience of life in urban societies. The three dimensions amount to an approach to the urban space and its transformation, which is cautious, insecure, flexible, innovative, incoherent and contradictive, with considerable intended and unintended consequences for how cities are built and inhabited.

Biography: Ali Madanipour is Professor of Urban Design and the Director of Global Urban Research Unit (GURU) at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. He has studied (MArch, PhD), practised, and conducted research in architecture, urban design and planning. In 2010 he was the City of Vienna Senior Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Vienna and in 2011 the Wits-Claude Leon Distinguished Scholar at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. His latest books are Whose Public Space? (2010) and Knowledge Economy and the City (2011), both published by Routledge, London.

Date: 
Wednesday, 21 November, 2012 - 13:15 to 14:15
Event location: 
Classroom, Department of Architecture