Suchergebnisse

The phenomenon that has intensively been recorded in contemporary Greek urban reality is the observed deviation between built urban environment and the process of teaching urban planning in universities. The particularities of local architecture, products of the effort of adapting the peculiar urban landscape combined with the existing climatic conditions, are often ignored in order to create impressive elements (most times copies of international corresponding) aiming at superficial impressions than to function and duration. "Impression of the moment "often restricts urban formations to smoothly integrate within existing urban terrain and prohibits project to adequately adjust the existing environmental conditions. As soon as young students from architectural schools begin their profession as licensed architects, they realise the amount of legislative restrictions they have to face in order to adjust their practices to contemporary Greek urban status. Consequently, they are "trapped" between inspiration and reality. Our paper aims to reveal the way traditional urban design, as developed through years of adaptive function, operates in local urban tissues (Greek islands, town centres etc.) and how new projects have failed to adjust its qualities, neglecting to take into active consideration the existing reality. In light of the research, a few important conclusions have been reached as to propose ways of connecting theory with practice in Greek urban reality.

The paper aims to search for an alternate narrative of urban design within the complexities and the contradictions of the current production of urban spaces. In doing so it adopts a broader conception of design and position the reflection along the thematic context of the informal squat-occupation urban realities. It presents a conceptual elaboration around Giorgio Agamben's ontology and political aesthetics as an aggregate source toward a possible (re)calibration of the approach to urban design research and practice. Playing with the topos and the gesture of neoliberal urban design, and framing it into the wider background of the current trends of gated urbanisms and hyper symbolic urban regeneration, the paper explores the notion of profanation as act capable to unlock and enhance new modes of politics. The centrality of the act of profanation is seen – through the lenses of a design research initiative in Rome – not simply as a productive antidote to the 'sacred' phenomenon of urban design and its gesture imposed on humanity from the above, but as a site of resistance in reclaiming, above all, a capacity of speech for an otherwise displaced and silenced urban subject and, along with it, the intellectual productivity of urban design theory and practice themselves.

The paper aims to search for an alternate narrative of urban design within the complexities and the contradictions of the current production of urban spaces. In doing so it adopts a broader conception of design and position the reflection along the thematic context of the informal squat-occupation urban realities. It presents a conceptual elaboration around Giorgio Agamben's ontology and political aesthetics as an aggregate source toward a possible (re)calibration of the approach to urban design research and practice. Playing with the topos and the gesture of neoliberal urban design, and framing it into the wider background of the current trends of gated urbanisms and hyper symbolic urban regeneration, the paper explores the notion of profanation as act capable to unlock and enhance new modes of politics. The centrality of the act of profanation is seen – through the lenses of a design research initiative in Rome – not simply as a productive antidote to the 'sacred' phenomenon of urban design and its gesture imposed on humanity from the above, but as a site of resistance in reclaiming, above all, a capacity of speech for an otherwise displaced and silenced urban subject and, along with it, the intellectual productivity of urban design theory and practice themselves.