Aouad Delivers Alba's Urban Design Seminar: Mutations Contemporaines des Villes
Rem Koolhas/Harvard Project on the City, 2001
More than half of the world's population now lives in cities. Confronted with peri-urbanization, over densification, socio-spatial segregation, immigration and multiculturalism, economic crises or even wars, cities are now observing changes that are disrupting their initial structures. Faced with these transformations, the importance of which is analogous to the upheavals that cities experienced at the time of the industrial revolution, city stakeholders are looking for new concepts and tools to reinvent the city of tomorrow. This seminar analyzes the diversity of metropolitan spatial strategies, whether in terms of their objectives or values, as well as the methods of development and implementation.
To do this, it relies primarily on urban operations known as renewal, requalification, renovation or even regeneration, all synonyms that reinvent the way of conceiving the city of tomorrow. The Seminar begins with an explanation of the concept of the city. Based on the example of the Generic Roman City, a review of the basic equipment that constitutes it (buildings, monuments, planning, infrastructure, services, etc.). As the Roman city proliferates, it turns into a Specific City, hence the need to introduce new connection and adaptation equipment. Examples of cities are given such as the city of Timgad in Algeria and that of Kowloon in Hong Kong.
To complete this first part, a quick read of the basic principles of the latest Habitat III report introduces students to the notion of urban regeneration and spatial strategy. Finally, a quick passage on the trend of infographics and Big Data which floods social networks and which discloses information that is both incomplete and confusing if misused. Through the study of certain cities, the second part of the seminar will try to extract the essence of a spatial strategy implemented by the responsible bodies and try to understand at the same time, the objectives, the role, the lines of action as well as the actors who participated in this strategy. These strategies will be discussed while keeping a critical eye on the validity of the methods used and the specificity of the lines of action in relation to the city in question.
London (real estate investments), New York (conservation of the urban heritage), Istanbul (the socio-spatial evolution from industrial to residential), Barcelona (the superblocks) , Rotterdam (water management and the port), Amsterdam (rethinking the new city on top of the old) and Shanghai (peri-urban arteries mutations) are the case studies overviewed during the seminar.
