Committee: Anat Falbel (EAHN Urban Representation Working Group, University of Rio de Janeiro), Andrea Maglio (Università di Napoli Federico II), Tatiana Mazali (Politecnico di Torino – DIST), Sara Monaci (Politecnico di Torino – DIST), Peter Stabel (European Association for Urban History (EAUH), University of Antwerp), Donatella Strangio (Università di Roma La Sapienza).
Reporting: Donatella Strangio (Università di Roma La Sapienza).
The crisis affecting the physical and social space immediately provokes various kinds of effects, needs and reactions and disclose human and spatial vulnerabilities. Crisis can be provoked by health, economic, natural disasters, wars or terror. However, in all these situations they create urgency in society, groups, buildings, and modify lifestyles. During times of crisis cities, we are forced to adapt as well as some buildings and infrastructures and temporary services are implemented. This need generates a stress in society following the reactions, the forms of adaptations or oppositions to the forms of social control.
Furthermore, during the crisis and beyond, perceptions and representations of the impact of the crisis on social and physical space generate imagery and narratives that constitute important keys for different kinds of analysis of urban vulnerability and interpretations at different period from various disciplinary perspectives. They also allow us to investigate some effects of disease and how different forms of adaptation or non-adatation impact cities.
More specifically the macrosession will include (but it will be limited to):
Reactions to social control.
Both, resilience achieved by adapting or not adapting to change are reactions that create stress in society and require higher levels of social control to be organised by the civic authorities or by other stakeholders in urban society (e.g. epidemics require measures of sanitary regulation; natural disasters require new building codes and/or the relocation of particular activities; economic crisis by the changing grasp of particular groups on economic decision making processes etc.). The way in which these measures are accepted or opposed is defined by different variables. This strand of contributions will try to define how the acceptance of or opposition to the heightened social control by city and state governments or by other political, social, religious or cultural actors in the urban fabric interfered in periods of crisis with reactions of adaptivity or of the refusal of adapting of the social organisation of city life.
Impact on lifestyles, vulnerabilities, inequalities, categories and groups with difficulties in adapting to change.
Policymakers and public health experts unanimously recognize the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on vulnerable persons: even in countries with well-developed responses, the outbreak and its repercussions imperil the basic well-being of social groups whose livelihoods are already precarious. The goals is to deepen this theme with the help of intersectionality and the analysis of complex systems in an interdisciplinary critique of the responses at the national government level and how this affects cities and its community, public health but above all information and communication, not forgetting what is happening in migratory flows and their directions within the cities.
Promising practices are evaluated in target urban communities through case studies spanning diverse disciplines and vulnerable populations.
Representations of the effects of disease on the urban environment, as well as the representations of their response to medical issues (e.g. 14th-century Black Death; 19th-century Cholera; 20th century Spanish Flu; Tuberculosis; 1980s AIDS; 2020 COVID)
Confronting contemporaneous (or future) representations that throw interpretive light on the responses to each of those crises, namely the infrastructure administered by the public and private sectors (city circulation, water and sewage systems, electrification, new building materials and design programs), we would like to invite our participants to analyse how those representations were produced and circulated within and among continents provoking new urban strategies, as well as new visual representations.
COVID imagery and narratives.
How the last couple of years have shaped our views on the relationship between the city and disease, and ultimately how this relationship has been represented. How have strategies of representation changed during or after critical health conditions? Has the contemporary pandemic produced a new visuality?
Buildings and infrsastructure in/for emergency conditions.
This topic specifically calls for contributions on buildings in war periods when cities are forced to adapt and change their structure both at the architectural and urban scales. Fortifications, supply infrastructures and - in the wars of the twentieth century - anti-aircraft shelters are just a few examples. Even the current 'technological' wars bring about a series of changes whose extent is still to be evaluated.
Narratives about post-crisis urban scenario.
The topic investigates the post-crisis narratives and the forms of inequalities related to the conditions of marginalized workers (e.g. women, immigrants, riders etc.) to the new reconfiguration of housing and urban spaces and to the conflictual narratives, with a focus also on digital narratives
More topics
Interested persons applying can add more topics and interpretations