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The article scrutinizes the impact of the 1968 student protests on architectural education and epistemology within the Italian and American context, the advocacy planning movement and the relationship of architecture and urban planning with the socio-political climate around 1968. It aims to demonstrate how the concepts of urban renewal and 'nuova dimensione' were progressively abandoned in the USA and Italy respectively. It presents how the critique of these concepts was related to the conviction that they were incompatible with socially effective architecture and urban design approaches. The article sheds light on the complexity of the reorientations that took place in both contexts, taking into consideration the impact of student protests, and the 1968 Civil Rights Action the architects and urban planners's task on the curricula of schools of architecture. It also investigates certain counter-events and counter-publications in the USA and Italy, shedding light on how they reinvented the relationship between architecture and democracy. It reveals the tensions between enhancing equality in planning process and local bureaucracy in the case of advocacy planning strategies. ; ISSN:2165-0020

As a concept or idea Europe is a project, the task of thinking and accomplishing universality. Eurocentrism as a concept is specifiable only within the context of modernity and is crucial for thinking modernity. Modernity is here understood as an attitude, as a way of relating to contemporary reality. The efforts to incorporate postcolonialist criticism into architectural discourse, during the last four decades, have been proved risky, as they cannot avoid the peril of "provincializing" Europe. In order to write a history that is not based on the western canon, it is necessary to avoid labels such as "other" or colonial. By depicting Europe and the West as a homogeneous power of domination over the rest of the world, postcolonial criticism turns 'Europe' into the blind spot of its own discourse. The fallacious character of dichotomies, such as western/nonwestern or Eurocentric/non-Eurocentric, becomes evident if we think that various societies have adopted aspects of western modernity without fully adopting them, fitting them into the indigenous culture. Europe, as a concept, represents the potential for an enlightened resistance in a world that is progressively becoming dominated by the mono-perspectivism of globalism. Placing Eurocentric narratives under critical scrutiny, an attitude which is symptomatic of the development of architectural history since the dissolution of colonialist models, is accompanied by the questioning of the earlier zeitgeist theories, which, for a long time, had served to legitimize modernism. What seems to be at stake nowadays is the complicity of architecture with structures of power and dominant ideological agendas in society. The tension between the scientific ethos of the task of the historian, which demands a commitment free of preconceptions and value judgments, and the political function of the project of history, which is based on a certain social order, has always existed since the emergence of the profession of the historian and was reflected in the educational mission of ...

Festac '77, also known as the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture was a major international festival held in Lagos, Nigeria, from 15 January 1977 to 12 February 1977. This paper focuses on Doxiadis Associates' masterplan for Festac Town, a federal housing estate located along the Lagos-Badagry Expressway in Lagos State, Nigeria, paying special attention to the infrastructure along the Lagos-Badagry Highway. This project, which exemplifies the late modernist concerns for urban development in the Global South and should be understood within the context of modernisation that followed Nigeria's independence, concerned the design of a town aiming at hosting the visitors of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos in 1977. It was assigned in 1974 by the Federal Republic of Nigeria to Doxiadis Associates and was conceptualised as "a model residential community with all the necessary functions and facilities to serve a permanent population" after the end of the aforementioned festival. This masterplan was based on the theory of ekistics developed by Greek city planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, and included the construction of significant infrastructure installations. The scope of the paper is twofold: to investigate the connections between Doxiadis's understanding of the role of infrastructure in this project and his conception of 'Ecumenopolis', and to relate Doxiadis's vision for 'Ecumenopolis' to the idea of Eurafrica, referring to the political project that emerged in the 1920s based on the idea that Europe's future survival was bound up with Europe's successful merger with Africa. Doxiadis's concept of 'Ecumenopolis' departed from the hypothesis that the urbanisation, the growth of population, and the development of means of transport and human networks would lead to a fusion of the urban areas and megalopolises forming a single continuous planetwide city. Doxiadis's "Towards Ecumenopolis" (1961), a confidential report that focused on how to devise a "di!erent approach" to the City of the Future, treated infrastructure as a skeleton of a body covering the entire globe and resulting from the balance between settlements, production and nature. In his second report on 'Ecumenopolis', Doxiadis claimed that Africa was the largest and most suitable area to welcome inbound capitals and investments. The Africa Transport Plan was intended to provide the basic layout of his 'Ecumenopolis'. The paper examines a set of maps displaying settlements, routes, airways and human corridors that Doxiadis Associates produced to explore the potentials of the concept of 'Ecumenopolis', relating the latter to Eurafrica. One can read in the issue of May 1977 of Ebony: "For 29 days, black people from everywhere – from Africa, Europe, African-America, South America, Canada, and the islands of the seas – testified to the haunting presence of blackness in the world". As Denis Ekpo remarks, in "Culture and Modernity Since FESTAC 77", in 1977, thanks to FESTAC, "Lagos had become the Mecca of African collective cultural and artistic self-retrieval and self-accreditation". The objective of the paper is to examine closely the cultural-historic complexity of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, the so-called FESTAC '77, during which thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the Black diaspora assembled in Lagos and to relate it to Doxiadis's ideas.

The paper examines the role of architects and urban planners in shaping connections between European land-based mobility, cities and landscapes. It will investigate the development of spaces aiming to link automobility to the everyday experience of European citizens in different countries, adjusting their interventions to local sensibilities. For over half a century, politicians have promoted transportation and transnational mobility for commodities and individuals by planning and funding the E-road network. This attempt to link the different European nations and overcome their separate plans has reshaped the urban landscape and the territory at large. The Declaration on the Construction of Main International Traffic Arteries in 1950 sketched a system that would connect Europe from Scandinavia to Sicily. The construction of a highway system for Europe was already anticipated in 1968. The paper demonstrates how urban planning and architecture play a key role in implementing new types of mobilities promoting environmental sustainability. At the centre of the paper lie the imaginaries produced by architects and urban planners, and their vision for highways in different national contexts and for their connexions to planned new towns. Taking into account that the EU and its nations aim to overcome regimes of petroleum-based mobility and associated architectures, the paper explains how the land-based transportation of both individuals and commodities in the E-Road network functions as an actor of planetary urbanization, investigating three kinds of nodes within the E-Road network: the nodes encountered on the E-Roads, those to be found at the gates to cities, and the new structures aiming to imitate the urban dimension but proposing a novel articulation of pedestrian and automobile circulation. It aims to relate the expression of the three nodes-typologies in various national contexts - characterised by different European urban planning methods - to overarching approaches in the design of mobility. The paper is developed around two layers: a layer concerning the comparison of the conception of highways within different national contexts, including the comparison of designs for the German Autobahn, the Italian autostrada, the French autoroutes à péage etc., and a layer discussing the designs and spatial imaginaries of the E-Road network. Analysing these layers will allow a better understanding of the tensions between national visions and trans-European urbanization, combining the local with the trans-European dimension, and contributing to a new understanding of the history of Europeanization.

The paper sheds light on the relationship between architecture and corporatism in Sweden, paying special attention to Cøsta Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, and Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity edited by Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna. It examines how the automobile, as a physical and perceptual presence, has influenced the relationship between welfare landscapes and social housing in Sweden. Starting out from Gro Hagemann's statement – in "Paradise Lost: Social Citizenship in Norway and Sweden" – that "[s]ocial integration was a key part of the folkhem idea, and social marginalisation and exclusion remain low in both Sweden and Norway", it explores how architects and urban designers in Sweden began to take the car into full consideration when designing new social housing ensembles, neighbourhoods and cities. During the 1970s, in contrast with the American drive-centred suburbia, the design of the Swedish suburban environment, as described in the late-seventies issues of Human Environment in Sweden, was based on the intention to minimise as much as possible the "suburban use of the automobile". Within the context of the Swedish model, social policies are designed to ensure basic quality of living to all citizens, while economic policies are focused on the labor market and fiscal policy with the goal to achieve economic growth with price stability. During the 1950s and 1960s the Swedish model achieved full employment, promoted consistent growth and maintained price stability. Sven Markelius was planning director between 1944 and 1954. During this period, an innovative urban planning model known as the ABC model was developed. This model was based on the imitation of the variety and animation of city life in newly created large scale suburb towns. In contrast with the American drive-centred suburbia, the design of the Swedish suburban environment, as described in the late-seventies issues of Human Environment in Sweden, was based on the intention to minimise as much as possible the "suburban use of the automobile". Vällingby was the first prototype ABC city designed in Stockholm in the 1950s. In cases such as the Vällingby suburban district, design strategies were explicitly set against the "excessive reliance on the automobile as the means of transportation" characterising American suburbs. In contrast with the Vällingby households that, as David Popenoe notes, had "two cars, and a significant percentage (35-40) [had] […] no car", Järvalyftet – a large-scale project that intended to renew a section of northern Stockholm with a population of ca. 60,000 – envisioned a renewed role for the motorways and their connection to housing design, as becomes evident in the description of this project in the OECD Reviews on Local Job Creation, Employment and Skills Strategies in Sweden: "The new motorway around Stockholm will go nearby, which better connects the areas to other communities". This paper explores the shift from the model of the so-called Folkhemmet (The People's Home) to the incorporation of new ideas of proximity enhanced by the integration of motorways in the design of social housing in Sweden during the last few years. Analysing the impact of automobile perceptual regimes on the dominant social housing models in Sweden will help us better understand the role of the car in 21st-century social housing design and its social relevance within the welfare state.

The article sheds light on the relationship between architecture and corporatism in Sweden, paying special attention to Cøsta Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, and Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity edited by Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna. It examines how the automobile, as a physical and perceptual presence, has influenced the relationship between welfare landscapes and social housing in Sweden. Starting out from Gro Hagemann's statement – in "Paradise Lost: Social Citizenship in Norway and Sweden" – that "[s]ocial integration was a key part of the folkhem idea, and social marginalisation and exclusion remain low in both Sweden and Norway", it explores how architects and urban designers in Sweden began to take the car into full consideration when designing new social housing ensembles, neighbourhoods and cities. During the 1970s, in contrast with the American drive-centred suburbia, the design of the Swedish suburban environment, as described in the late-seventies issues of Human Environment in Sweden, was based on the intention to minimise as much as possible the "suburban use of the automobile". In cases such as the Vällingby suburban district, design strategies were explicitly set against the "excessive reliance on the automobile as the means of transportation" characterising American suburbs. In contrast with the Vällingby households that, as David Popenoe notes, had "two cars, and a significant percentage (35-40) [had] [.] no car", Järvalyftet – a large-scale project that intended to renew a section of northern Stockholm with a population of ca. 60,000 – envisioned a renewed role for the motorways and their connection to housing design, as becomes evident in the description of this project in the OECD Reviews on Local Job Creation, Employment and Skills Strategies in Sweden: "The new motorway around Stockholm will go nearby, which better connects the areas to other communities". This article explores the shift from the model of the so-called Folkhemmet (The People's Home) to the incorporation of new ideas of proximity enhanced by the integration of motorways in the design of social housing in Sweden during the last few years. Analysing the impact of automobile perceptual regimes on the dominant social housing models in Sweden will help us better understand the role of the car in 21st-century social housing design and its social relevance within the welfare state.

The paper focuses on Cornelius Castoriadis and Henri Lefebvre's approaches and sheds light on "the imaginary" in the politics of self-governance. It shows how tactics of self-governance and the imagi-nary accompanying them revive all the contradictions between the State reason, on the one hand, and human reason and freedom, on the other hand. Castoriadis, in The Imaginary Institution of Soci-ety, emphasizes the internal relation between what is intended (the development of autonomy) and that through which it is intended (the exercise of this autonomy). He notes that these are two mo-ments of a single process and defines as revolutionary politics "a praxis which takes as its object the organization and orientation of society as they foster the autonomy of all its members and which rec-ognizes that this presupposes a radical transformation of society, which will be possible, in its turn, only through the autonomous activity of individuals." My paper treats the following questions: How might a politics like this exist? On what could it be based and what would its implications be for the tactics of formation of urban design tools? Henri Lefebvre, in "Theoretical Problems of Autogestion", underscores the fact that autogestion intro-duces and stimulates a contradiction with the State. Autogestion, according to Lefebvre, calls into question the State's functioning as a constraining force erected above society as a whole, capturing and demanding the rationality that is inherent to social relations and practice. Lefebvre also considers that autogestion tends to resolve contradictions by subletting them into a new totality. In parallel, he wonders whether the principle of autogestion is an ideal whose rational core and content is ultimately derived from the democratic ideal. My paper will revisit this question, juxtaposing it to the following question raised by Castoriadis, in The Imaginary Institution of Society: does the critique of rationalism not exclude the possibility of establishing a destructive and constructive 'revolutionary dynamics'? Despite Lefebvre's claim that autogestion cannot be a utopia, he refers to Henri Desroche's notion of "occupia", which is used to define a genre of socializing related to practical utopia. He claims that au-togestion "shows the practical way to change life". My aim is to present how this "practical way to change life" in Lefebvre's thought relates to Castoriadis' understanding of praxis. Juxtaposing Cas-toriadis' conception of autonomy and Lefebvre's understanding of autogestion, I examine what strat-egies of bottom-up urban politics are implied by each of these conceptions. Taking as a starting point the fact that Castoriadis' praxis is based on a kind of knowledge that is always fragmentary and provi-sional, I examine what would be entailed by an integration of such a conception of knowledge into the procedures of formation of urban design tools. Special attention is paid to how Lefebvre and Cas-toriadis' conceptions and autogestion respectively aimed to reinvent the relationship between public space and the collective ideal.

This paper could be placed within a network of studies that aim to shed light on the complex relationships between the Cold War policies including the European Recovery Program (ERP), known as Marshall Plan, on the one hand, and architecture and urbanism, on the other hand. Its main objective is to provide a precise and deep understanding of how architecture and urban planning, which are related to the Marshall plan politics, contributed to the formation of national identity in both Greece and Italy. Within this context, the paper places much importance on the interplay between urban planning and politics. In other words, it is built upon the general understanding that the Marshall Plan played a crucial role in the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. The paper aims to show that architecture and urbanism were very important in this respect. In order to do so, it focuses on two key players regarding the connection between the politics of the Marshall Plan and agendas for urban design: the Greek town planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis (1913-1975) and the Italian industrialist Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960). In parallel, the paper springs from the observation that a couple of monographic studies related to similar research topics have been conducted, but that there are as yet no comparative studies providing a clear understanding of how certain key players in both politics and urban planning, like Doxiadis and Olivetti, contributed to the formation of national identity in different national contexts. Both Doxiadis and Olivetti were agents within the Cold War and Marshall Plan policies and contributed to the different respective trajectories in which Greece and Italy respectively ended up, while using the Marshall Plan for their reconstruction after the Second World War.

For Le Corbusier, the architect was the authority on living and their role was to know what is best for humans, as it becomes evident from what he declares in The Athens Charter: "Who can take the measures necessary to the accomplishment of this task if not the architect who possesses a complete awareness of man, who has abandoned illusory designs, and who, judiciously adapting the means to the desired ends, will create an order that bears within it a poetry of its own? The paper is focused on the critique of the principles of the Athens Charter and its relation to the attempt to strengthen the articulations between architecture and its social, economic and political context. It examines Team 10's intention to replace the four functions — dwelling, work, recreation and transport — of the Charter of Athens by the concept of the "human association", on the one hand, and to incorporate within the scope of architecture reflections regarding the impact of scale on the design process, on the other hand. The CIAM X was structured around two groups representing the two conflicting generations. As Nicholas Bullock notes, in Building the Post-war World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain, the group representing the older generation focused on the work of CIAM since its foundation in the form of a charter similar to the Athens Charter, while the group representing the younger generation tried to extend the work of CIAM to rethink, as Alison and Peter Smithson noted in 1956, "the basic relationships between people and life". The goal of the CIAM X, held in Dubrovnik between 19 and 25 July 1956, was to challenge the assumptions of the Charter of Habitat. During this meeting, which neither Le Corbusier nor Walter Gropius attended, the younger generation consisting of Aldo van Eyck, Jacob Bakema, Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods, and Alison and Peter Smithson established a new agenda for mass housing, "Habitat for the Greater Number". It was at this CIAM meeting that the Smithsons presented their "Fold Houses". A number of meetings preceding the CIAM X were held in London, Doorn, Paris, La Sarraz, and Padua. The main objective of this paper is to show how the debates that preceded the CIAM challenged the Charter of Habitat.

This paper examines how Gottfried Semper's approach triggered the shift from an understanding of ornament as artefact to an experimental model. In parallel, it reveals the implications of such a reorienta- tion of the concept of ornament for both design and architecture. Pivotal for this shift was Semper's "On the Formal Principles of Adornment and its Meaning as a Symbol in Art" (1856), which marks, firstly, a relocation of the quest for demonstration to theorisation, and, secondly, an intensification of the interaction between graphic illustration and abstract speculation. What is argued here is that Semper's cosmological inquiries on ornamentation enacted a comprehension of ornaments as non-autonomous objects, upgrading them into reflective devices. Semper was in exile in London between 1850 and 1855, after his escape from Dresden on 9 May 1849 when Prus-sian and Saxon troops defeated the revolt in which he had participated in support of democratic rights and the unity of the German state. The presentation will focus on Semper's comments on the 1851 Great London Exhibition, and especially on his critical remarks regarding Sir Joseph Pax-ton's Crystal Palace whose design for the Great Exhibition had been accepted in the summer of 1850. Some months later, in February 1951, Semper drafted a school programme including lessons for engineers and architects. In March of the same year, Edwin Chadwick invited Semper, on be-half of Paxton, to become an assistant of the latter while working on the Crystal Palace. Semper rejected this offer, presenting as an excuse his involvement in the establishment of a school for architects in London, which, as he stated, had garnered publicity in the German and Swiss news-papers. Despite the fact that Semper interpreted the Great London Exhibition as a "world phe-nomenon" representing contemporary cultural conditions, he described the sentiments that a walk through it provoked as a "Babylonian confusion", claiming that the perplexity it induced prevented an intelligible perception of the exhibited objects, making the impression they instigated non-compatible with his aspiration for a "practical heuristics" system. My objective is to examine whether the questions that arose in Semper's mind when experiencing the Crystal Palace pushed him to question the understanding of architecture that he had previ-ously developed in The Four Elements of Architecture , which was published shortly before his arrival in London, according to a distinction into four elements: the hearth, the roof, the enclosure and the mound. Additionally, I will investigate the extent to which his encounter with the Crystal Palace played a role in his use of the concept of stoffwechsel, which Semper introduced from bi-ology in order to describe the material transformation of artistic forms. The elaboration of this no-tion allowed Semper to argue for replacing the conception of ornament as artefact by its under-standing as architectural element. In other words, it is through this concept that Semper defended his integration of the decorative object into the history of architecture. These questions will be discussed in relation to an analysis of why Practical Art in Metal and Hard Materials (1852) was pivotal for the re-invention of decorative objects' meaning.

A point of departure of this paper is the hypothesis that the quotidian practices of communities and their socio-economic and cultural characteristics are interconnected with the spatial attributes of co-housing practices. The paper focuses on the examination of the collaboration of the Ethiopian government collaborated with the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) that intended to address the issues related to the mass housing program in Addis Ababa. Special attention is paid to the so-called "UN-Habitat", a Human Settlements programme of the United Nations established in 1978 aiming to enhance the urban future. In 2005, the City Administration of Addis Ababa initiated a large-scale housing development project in order to address urban poverty and improve the living conditions of low and middle-income residents. To grasp the specificity of the Ethiopian context, one should bear in mind that in 2014 only 20.7% of Ethiopian residents lived in urban settlements as a report of the United Nations published that same year informs us. Departing from the fact that from 2006 to 2016 the area of condominium housing has increased to occupy 11% of the area of the city of Addis Ababa (fig. 1), the paper examines the tensions between universal aspirations and local realities in the case of Ethiopia's most ambitions mass housing scheme, which is 'Addis Ababa Grand Housing Program' (AAGHP) and was launched in 2004. This program was integrated in the 'Integrated Housing Development Program' (IHDP) in 2006. The particularity of the urban redevelopment of Addis Ababa lies in the fact that, in contrast with the majority of the "new city" approaches, it incorporated and permitted the construction of low-income housing thanks to the IHDP, which contributed significantly to the acceleration of the production of social housing in Ethiopia. My objective is to shed light on the common codes and conventions characterising the production of condominium housing in Addis Ababa, on the one hand, and to render explicit how the fact that space-as-commons functions a set of social relations which potentially challenges the very foundations of ownership becomes evident in the case of urban redevelopment of Addis Ababa, on the other hand.

For Le Corbusier, the architect was the authority on living and their role was to know what is best for humans, as it becomes evident from what he declares in The Athens Charter: "Who can take the measures necessary to the accomplishment of this task if not the architect who possesses a complete awareness of man, who has abandoned illusory designs, and who, judiciously adapting the means to the desired ends, will create an order that bears within it a poetry of its own? The paper is focused on the critique of the principles of the Athens Charter and its relation to the attempt to strengthen the articulations between architecture and its social, economic and political context. It examines Team 10's intention to replace the four functions — dwelling, work, recreation and transport — of the Charter of Athens by the concept of the "human association", on the one hand, and to incorporate within the scope of architecture reflections regarding the impact of scale on the design process, on the other hand. The CIAM X was structured around two groups representing the two conflicting generations. As Nicholas Bullock notes, in Building the Post-war World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain, the group representing the older generation focused on the work of CIAM since its foundation in the form of a charter similar to the Athens Charter, while the group representing the younger generation tried to extend the work of CIAM to rethink, as Alison and Peter Smithson noted in 1956, "the basic relationships between people and life". The goal of the CIAM X, held in Dubrovnik between 19 and 25 July 1956, was to challenge the assumptions of the Charter of Habitat. During this meeting, which neither Le Corbusier nor Walter Gropius attended, the younger generation consisting of Aldo van Eyck, Jacob Bakema, Georges Candilis, Shadrach Woods, and Alison and Peter Smithson established a new agenda for mass housing, "Habitat for the Greater Number". It was at this CIAM meeting that the Smithsons presented their "Fold Houses". A number of meetings preceding the CIAM X were held in London, Doorn, Paris, La Sarraz, and Padua. The main objective of this paper is to show how the debates that preceded the CIAM challenged the Charter of Habitat.

Festac '77, also known as the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture was a major international festival held in Lagos, Nigeria, from 15 January 1977 to 12 February 1977. This paper focuses on Doxiadis Associates' masterplan for Festac Town, a federal housing estate located along the Lagos-Badagry Expressway in Lagos State, Nigeria, paying special attention to the infrastructure along the Lagos-Badagry Highway (fig. 1). This project, which exemplifies the late modernist concerns for urban development in the Global South and should be understood within the context of modernisation that followed Nigeria's independence, concerned the design of a town aiming at hosting the visitors of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos in 1977 (fig. 2). It was assigned in 1974 by the Federal Republic of Nigeria to Doxiadis Associates and was conceptualized as "a model residential community with all the necessary functions and facilities to serve a permanent population" after the end of the aforementioned festival. This masterplan was based on the theory of ekistics developed by Greek city planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, and included the construction of significant infrastructure installations. The scope of the paper is twofold: to investigate the connections between Doxiadis's understanding of the role of infrastructure in this project and his conception of 'Ecumenopolis', and to relate Doxiadis's vision for 'Ecumenopolis' to the idea of Eurafrica, referring to the political project that emerged in the 1920s based on the idea that Europe's future survival was bound up with Europe's successful merger with Africa. Doxiadis's concept of 'Ecumenopolis' departed from the hypothesis that the urbanization, the growth of population, and the development of means of transport and human networks would lead to a fusion of the urban areas and megalopolises forming a single continuous planetwide city (fig. 3). Doxiadis's "Towards Ecumenopolis" (1961), a confidential report that focused on how to devise a "different approach" to the City of the Future, treated infrastructure as a skeleton of a body covering the entire globe and resulting from the balance between settlements, production and nature. In his second report on 'Ecumenopolis', Doxiadis claimed that Africa was the largest and most suitable area to welcome inbound capitals and investments. The Africa Transport Plan was intended to provide the basic layout of his 'Ecumenopolis'. The paper examines a set of maps displaying settlements, routes, airways and human corridors that Doxiadis Associates produced to explore the potentials of the concept of 'Ecumenopolis', relating the latter to Eurafrica. One can read in the issue of May 1977 of Ebony: "For 29 days, black people from everywhere - from Africa, Europe, African-America, South America, Canada, and the islands of the seas - testified to the haunting presence of blackness in the world". My objective is to examine closely the cultural-historic complexity of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, the so-called FESTAC '77, during which thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the Black diaspora assembled in Lagos. As Denis Ekpo remarks, in "Culture and Modernity Since FESTAC 77", in 1977, thanks to FESTAC, "Lagos had become the Mecca of African collective cultural and artistic self-retrieval and self-accreditation". The methodological approach on which the paper is based draws upon theoretical tools aims to go beyond "progress" or "influence", while the historiographical method on which the paper intends to challenge the schism between globalisation and regionalism.

This paper examines the advocacy planning movement and the socio-political climate of civil rights around 1968, focusing on two case studies that are closely connected to the critique of urban renewal in the United States: firstly, the founding of the Architect's Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), the first organization solely devoted to advocacy planning in the United States, and secondly, the establishment of the City Planning Forum at Yale School of Art and Architecture, an independent governing body which consisted of all full-time faculty members and students and – in dialogue with the civil rights movement – had as its main purpose to bring greater diversity to the department. Special attention is paid to the approaches of advocacy planner C. Richard Hatch and advocacy-inclined city-planner Christopher Tunnard, Chairman of the Department of City Planning of Yale University's School of Art and Architecture between 1966 and 1969. The ARCH was concerned with changing the architect's role and replacing the idea of city building with that of city living. Max Bond, its executive director, believed that "architect[s] should be […] representative[s] of the poor people, responding to their wishes, rather than […] advocate[s] of the white middle class imposing its compartmentalizing values and gridiron street plan upon Black and Spanish-speaking people who have quite other social ideals". The concern about involving neighbourhoods in the planning of their own housing became a central issue in the Department of City Planning at Yale School of Art and Architecture after the appointment of Tunnard as Chairman in 1966. The rejection of urban renewal is related to the conviction that it was incompatible with any kind of socially effective approach to architecture and urban design. Tunnard, who, since 1954, had established City Planning at Yale, largely criticised the involvement of Yale University in urban renewal projects in New Haven. In 1969, a group of students from the Department of City Planning of Yale University's School of Art and Architecture, who marshalled a critique against the university's role in the top-down urban renewal strategies, founded a new governance committee named City Planning Forum, which soon joined the Black Workshop, an activist group formed by ten African American design students in late 1968. My aim is to shed light on the emergence of the advocacy planning movement around 1968 and its aspiration to respond to the fulfilment of needs related to the welfare of society as a whole and the responsibility to provide equal housing opportunities and equal access to public amenities regardless of race, religion, or national origin. ARCH and City Planning Forum's aspiration to democratize urban planning should be understood within the context of the struggle over civil rights for African Americans in the United States in the 1960s. A paradox underlying their efforts is the fact that, despite their intention to broaden opportunities in participation, they were based on policies that maintained the centrality of federal aid and the prominence of professional expertise. My objective is to examine to what extent their strategies were aligned with the ambition of President Johnson's Great Society to renew citizens' role without undermining existing institutions. Special attention is paid to the tension between the intention of advocacy planning approaches to bring equality into the planning process and the risk of being co-opted by a local bureaucracy or a more powerful interest group.