Architecture, Cities, Sustainability and Life

Graham Cairns Announcement
Subject Fields
Architecture and Architectural History, Urban Design and Planning, Urban History / Studies, Environmental History / Studies, Geography

Architecture, Cities, Sustainability and Life

 

This conference brings together architects and urban planners with sociologists, human geographers and experts on planning, social policy and public health. It examines the city and its architecture from various standpoints and seeks to broaden our understanding of how our work as designers and planners of the built environment ties into related but separated fields such as sociology, community studies and, crucially right now in India, public health.

The event, entitled, Sustainable Architecture(s) - Humane Cities is hosted by Dayananda Sagar Institutions in Bangalore, India. While it is interested in questions of architecture, planning and related social policy as they directly affect India, it is expressly international and seeks input from diverse locations and scenarios.

The full call is included below.

 

DATES: March 23-25, 2022

ABSTRACTS: June 30, 2021 (Early)   /   Oct 30, 2021 (Late)

LOCATION: Bangalore, India

WEBSITE: https://architecturemps.com/bangalore/

 

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FULL CALL

In 2015, the year that the Indian government launched its 100 Smart Cities Mission, the United Nations published its 17 Sustainable Development Goals including the goal of  “Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. The Smart Cities Mission follows patterns of development undoubtedly spearheaded by the Global North. By contrast, sustainable development goals can be seen as predominately relevant to the Global South, which the UN projects suggests will be home to over 80% of the world’s megacities by 2030. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, each of these agendas is in the process of revision.

The problems faced by these cities will be enormous: the health and wellbeing of inhabitants; the housing of rural migrants; balancing formal planning with incremental and informal design; dealing with environmentally vulnerability; addressing social equity. They are all, already, issues that are both critical and subject to extensive debate. The World Health Organisation sees the notion of the ‘healthy city’ as already changed forever. Ananya Roy sees informality as a product of economic regulation, whether in Mexico, Egypt, India or Indonesia. Aromar Revi critiques the integration of the rural and the urban through the lens of sustainability and the notion of the rurban.

In bringing sustainability into the debate about healthy, equitable and humane urban development Revi opens a view onto questions of colonialism. Sustainability and public health have a conflicted history in the Global South where the march of economic development and agendas of public wellbeing and environmental protection often clash. Indeed, they have led to spatial practices such as uncontrolled density, ‘public safety’ zoning and gentrification that force the poor into cramped living conditions, insanitary housing, flood plain areas and more.

The problem is complicated more when we consider those cites of the Global South that mimic architectural and developmental practices of the North. Yasser Elshehtawy has coined the term Dubaization. He suggests that the race to construct tall buildings in the Middle East threatens the identity of cities from Bangalore to Cairo. In the Middle East and North African region this push towards the fast-paced commercial development of ‘global cities’ is particularly challenging. The arid and semi-arid environments of these places makes them vulnerable to climate change and drought and, in long term, unhealthy, unsafe and totally uninhabitable.

 

Visit the website:

https://architecturemps.com/bangalore/

Contact Information

Dr. Rama Subrahmanian / Cindee Hogan

Contact Email
info@architecturemps.com