This Friday, 31 October, is the very first World Cities Day promoted by UN-Habitat! This years theme is "Leading Urban Transformations".
Leading urban transformation is about redefining the urban paradigm for future generations. It is about empowering people to contribute to creative solutions that can improve our shared urban future. It is about innovation and new ideas to bring about the city we need and the future we want. 
City Space Architecture will be part of the event with the seminar "Life in Cities | Conversazioni sullo spazio pubblico", on urban transformation, urbanity and public space. The seminar is organized in collaboration with the Emilia-Romagna Region and will be held in Bologna at the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion, Fiera District. It will bring together public administrators, academic professors, professionals, artists and citizens, exchanging ideas and reflecting upon projects, experiences, research and practices, comparing different points of view and multidisciplinary approaches.
The seminar will be also dedicated to the presentation of the international research project "MaPS. Mastering Public Space". MaPS is a three-years term project intended to investigate relevant cities and geographical contexts, all around the world, through a large network of scholars devoted to urban and architectural studies. In addition, the seminar will include the presentation and exhibition of the photographic research "Pop-up City" developed by Fabio Mantovani and curated by Luisa Bravo, that was exhibited for the first time at the Museum of the History of Bologna, June 27-July 20, 2014. "Pop-up City" was presented on September 1-3, 2014, at the "Future of Places" conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, promoted by UN-Habitat, Project for Public Spaces and Ax:son Johnson Foundation.

The seminar "Life in Cities" is officially registered on the UN-Habitat World Cities Day website.
Follow the hashtag #citiesday #urbanoctober 
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To read the program of the event, click on the image on top left.

For any info about the seminar in Bologna, please write to: info@cityspacearchitecture.org

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At the beginning of the new Millennium global transformations of urban territories have opened the way, quite inevitably, to more and more complex and profound considerations about the places that surround us, the places that we have built, the opportunities we have missed, and those ones we must, instead, learn to grasp. Common ground, common places, common people, common sense, common tradition were the declarations of the 13.International Architecture Exhibition in Venice in 2012.

It is by now a widely shared fact that cities are a common good, so actions devoted to its transformation, requalification and valorisation should involve everyone. Ideas coming from citizens, associations, residents and ordinary people are easily available and shareable through the virtual world, thus causing drastic changes in the way of thinking and acting in the urban realm. We are in the midst of an unprecedented moment in planning. Although signs of hardship are all around, we see the emergence of a powerful, networked, creative movement of people who demonstrate that place-based and people-oriented actions are possible, despite economic or political obstacles.

In June 2013 City Space Architecture started to work on the research project "Pop-up City", in the city of Bologna, as a part of the international research project "Past Present and Future of Public Space", coordinated by our President Luisa Bravo, in collaboration with the photographer Fabio Mantovani.
Working on different locations, the "Pop-up City" project intends to highlight existing places with a potential for public life, looking for invisible dimensions of the public realm, searching for an "ordinary magic" along everyday streets, squares and neighborhoods, delivering new powerful images of the urban world.
We explore in particular those suburban places generally disconnected from the mental representation of the urban narrative plot of public spaces, made of beauty and fascination, with no identity and continuity with the historic environment. We are moving further from the European mental attitude that immediately links the concept of “public space” to the idea of a traditional designed square.
These places are part of the everyday existence, but common people are accustomed to experience them as fragments in a sort of jump-cut urbanism, affected by the use of cars. We pass through but we don’t see.
The Pop-up City project is trying to document what is now largely undocumented.
We are representing the city of Bologna, but actually the Pop-up City could be anywhere.

To read the curatorial statement, click on the image on top left.

Some reflections from Pop-up City #11 photographic session at Giardini Margherita, Bologna.

During the past year we worked on investigating some bottom-up actions and informal practices able to transform and enhance public space and its perception in the city of Bologna.

Our challenge was: can we deliver a powerful idea of the surrounding everyday space, often taken for granted, through a single picture? Together with the photographer and member of our Board of Consuls Fabio Mantovani we looked for different locations, sometimes hidden or car-crossing spaces, sometimes suburban places, that we intended to enlighten. Working together with Fabio means putting yourself in the line, leaving the mind open to unforeseen experimentations.

One of our locations was the biggest park in the city of Bologna, the Giardini Margherita. In this park in the Seventies you could even find some lions who lived in a dedicated cage, in a sort of small successful zoo. Today the lions are no longer there but the space they were living in has remained: once the grid was removed, a raised platform and a wall were erected, someone then painted a mural representing a jungle. The collective memory of this place is still so vivid and strong in the Bologna community that even today’s teenagers, who never saw the lions, meet at “the cage of lions”.

Close to this meeting point there’s a primary school: every afternoon, as after-school activity, lots of children get out and meet at “the cage of lions” place, to stay and play, together with their parents.

Last April we launched on our website a national competition for short films, entitled "Beyond the Ideal City", as a part of the "Past Present and Future of Public Space" international research activity, involving art, architecture and urban design, in partnership with Cineteca di Bologna and Ottagono.com. The deadline for submitting proposals was June 3, 2014.

According with the competition announcement, we were planning to award the winner on June 25, during the cinema session of the "Past Present and Future of Public Space" international conference, that took place in Bologna, June 25-27. We created a Facebook page for this event, look here to get more news of what happened!
But just few days before the conference, while we were watching the submitted proposals and discussing with the jury, we received the offer from Cineteca di Bologna to include our competition in the next "Visioni Italiane" [Italian Visions] Festival, a well-known Italian competition for short films. That was really a great offer for us!
Together with Ottagono.com we decided to postpone the call for proposals, as a brand new section of the Cineteca Festival, entitled "Urban Visions | Beyond the Ideal City".