StadsSalonsUrbains lectures series 2023-2024

The lecture series delves into the intricate process of constructing the built environment, highlighting how meaning is embodied in the various layers that have been added over time. Through a multidisciplinary lens, experts in architecture, urban planning, archaeology, landscape architecture, heritage and history explore how the physical spaces we inhabit reflect the (building) culture, values, and norms of the societies that created them and, inversely, how our surroundings shape our experiences and identities.

By looking at the city fabric as an accumulated concentration of material, political, economic, environmental, technological and cultural history, we unravel how the city relates to its surrounding landscapes, how power dynamics and social inequalities are ingrained in our built heritage, but also how we can prospectively relate to the built environment as a combination of ‘embodied energy’ and ‘embodied culture’.

20.10.2023 | Barnabas Calder (University of Liverpool) | emergency stop: a call for radical inaction

10.11.2023 | Howard Davis (University of Oregon) |  crafting the city: revisiting 'the culture of building'

01.03.2024 | Sabine Barles (University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) | from circularity to linearity : the infrastructures of urban metabolism, 18th-20th centuries > CANCELLED and REPLACED by Daniel Barber (University of Technology Sydney) | thermal practices

15.03.2024 | Tom Leslie (University of Illinois) | building Chicago: industry, capital, politics, and construction in America’s ‘Second City’

29.03.2024 | Mercedes Volait (French National Centre for Scientific Research) | Egyptian modern, from within

24.05.2024 | Miles Glendinning (University of Edinburgh) | a modern vernacular? mass housing as a place-specific global and local heritage