Dear All, I forward you this interesting Call for Position Papers. Best M. --- My Ideal City, an European Project SCENARIOS FOR THE EUROPEAN CITY OF THE 3rd MILLENNIUM Venice, May 12th and 13th Call for Position Papers The My Ideal City project has been funded by the European Union to deal with the representation in an immersive, virtual, environment of the results of participatory processes involving the citizens of four cities (Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Lisbon, and Trento). Therefore, the project involved since the beginning a mixture of reflections on three dimensional representation, participation, and urban planning, in a period of time characterized by the contested and controversial meaning of the city as the central space for innovating the ways human beings live. The My Ideal City Conference looks for contributions that will foster the debate on how it is possible to give shape to the new, ideal, city, in order to represent it in innovative ways, stimulating new concepts of the city itself, and to enlarge the participation of citizens in the construction of the city. Topics for the conference 1. The Ideal City and the participatory process In the 21st century, the debate on how the construction of the city should take place highlights a number of opposing pairs: private vs. public, individual vs. collective, ideal vs. real, city vs. country. The conflict inherent in this dichotomies is presented on the contemporary scene as a matter of concern not to be mitigated, but as data on which to build new combinations, new forms of living and providing for projection towards a future that is often forgotten or erased from the bodies of today. The acronym M.I.C. (My Ideal City) symbolizes that clearly: it points to emerging questions to which many academic disciplines, like anthropology, architecture, engineering, geography, sociology, urban planning, and more, are responding through theoretical and empirical tools for understanding, for designing, and for constructing the new city. In particular, the acronym redirect to three main topics of reflection, and their combination: [My] The individual, freed from the standardization of the modern movement, draws daily new realities, asserting his/her own micro-politics of desire. The self-affirmation of the individual on the ground takes place on one side on the basis of a daily transformation denouncing a lack of long-distance gaze on things, with the crushing of the collective that seems to have erased the projective capacity of the desired; on the other side, the ecological, territorial, economic, and symbolic crisis of the city as a system calls for a new awareness and a shared planning that goes beyond simply individualism. Therefore, [My] represents the tension between the individual actions and practices, and the possibility to work out new possibilities for collective actions and practices. [Ideal] Ideal and real can be conceived as split, dichotomous terms, that act on different levels: the first seems to assume a negative meaning, based on its proximity to the concept of utopia, while the second holds a position so strong to become objective and preventing a critical look, design, and practices. Nevertheless, it is exactly the presence of an ideal understanding of contemporary cities, their representation through a discursive regime done of possibilities and opportunities, that makes possible to act on, change, and reassemble, the perspectives of urban development. [City] The city as a place of living and sharing, back to the centre of attention, calls for a review of methods and tools that manage its transformation. Decision makers, political movements, and common citizens, newly talk about participation to reduce the distance between the individual and the collective and between the ideal and the real, criticizing and dismissing forms of design aimed at accommodating superimposed, hetero-normative, meanings of living together in a contemporary city. Therefore, we welcome contributions that deal with the following, and not exhaustive, list of topics: - Individual desires and collective actions in the urban landscape - New forms of collective practices in the city - The role of idealized discourses in projecting the future of cities - Participation as a mean to collective action and utopian transformations 2. The construction of a new urban imagery: models, techniques, stereotypes The experience of building the MIC’s worlds allowed to deal with two major areas of widespread intrusive visual stereotypes, the image of the future city and the virtual environments browsable online. In both cases, the consolidation of visual clichés seem not only the result of a normal consumption of imagery but the consequence of an action practiced by the colonizers of the physical and virtual spaces: the spread of clichés is a preliminary step to the acquisition of consensus and ownership. The need for authenticity - of actuality in virtuality - has resulted in two basic choices, first in reference to a paradoxical and systematic 'stage' metaphor rather than a 'realistic' one, so that eventually we get an actual experience of a fiction rather a fictive experience of actuality, the other in the production of fiction obtained as a light footprint, scan, direct ‘quotation’ of the urban landscape. In our scenes was taken off the 'skin' of daily lighting, the usual colours and light hiding instead of showing the true appearance of the city. These issues may be briefly summarized in the figure that holds the two ends of the vision, namely the shape of the eyes and the substance of the picture. The thesis that elaborates these themes is that only an eccentric sight can reveal the depth, the thickness of inexhaustible visual material. Abnormal viewpoints, slowed and accelerated movements, unusual conditions allow to penetrate an invisible crust of visual stereotypes. Referring to this thesis we suggest a range of issues: - Figures and metaphors in the formation of urban imagery in architecture, cinema, visual arts, theater, TV production and videogames - Genesis and spread of urban stereotypes - ‘Naive’ maps of urban landscape: a comparison between popular and cultured formae urbis - Descriptive models and narrative models of urban form - Avatar’s promenade. Identity and identification in virtual bodies 3. Toward an energy efficient city A sustainable city is a city designed with care of its environmental dimension. It is peopled by citizens that have the objective to minimize their needs in terms of energy, materials, water and food and to minimize the emissions resulting from their lives. Among the many aspects that describe the concept of sustainability, the topic of energy has a particular importance for the important environmental, economic and political consequences on the future development of our world. Therefore, the ideal city explored by the MIC research has a particular awareness of the importance of energy conservation. The call aims at the collection of different contributions, that describe the multitude of combinations between the city and its energy requirements. This is not limited to the various technologies that can be adopted to create a self-sufficient city, but it involves the whole process of urban spaces and the lifestyle of its inhabitants, its narrative, its design, and its construction. The call seeks therefore to obtain contributions on the different topics, ranging from the energy efficiency applied to the planning sectors (transport, urban morphology), buildings, management of the city, new technologies, sustainable life-styles, social aspects of energy consumption, etc. On the other hand it has to be acknowledged that the energy efficiency of the built environment takes also into account the energy required for the production of the building materials and for the construction of all the final products, including the buildings and the city infrastructures. Therefore, an energy efficient city should take into account the energy effectiveness of its parts through their entire lifecycle and not just during their phase of use. Topics addressed: - Lifecycle Energy efficiency of buildings - Sustainable transport - Lifecycle Energy efficiency of the city services (public transportation, administration, etc.) - Resource management and disposal - Future solutions toward more sustainable cities PROGRAMME May 12th presentation of the results of European research MIC and lectio magistralis No.1 May 13th sessions of debate, deriving from the IUAV researches and the call for abstracts, in the form of three plenary sessions: The Ideal City and the participatory process; The construction of a new urban imagery: models, techniques, stereotypes; Towards an energy efficient city and lectio magistralis No.2. PARTICIPATION IN THE CONFERENCE Contributions should contain the following elements: name(s) of author(s), title of abstract, affiliation, e-mail contact information, thematic session of reference, key words (in number of three), abstract (a maximum number of 1.500 characters including spaces, approximately 400 words). The abstract should be written in English. Abstracts must be received by March 15th 2011 for prior approval to the following address: conference@myidealcity.eu. The scientific committee of the MIC will inform interested parties of accepting the proposals by March 31th 2011. The scientific committee split the selection into two categories: one dealing with speakers who will participate in sessions of debate and whose contribution in the form of paper will be published in the proceedings of the conference, the second on the papers that will be only published in conference proceedings. The authors of the accepted abstracts will be asked to submit a position paper (2.000 words, 8.000 characters including spaces, with a maximum of five images) to be included in the proceedings to be published in the IUAV Digital Library. The position papers should be sent by May 1th to conference@myidealcity.eu and formatted according to the format that will be sent to selected authors. A complete programme will be showed at www.myidealcity.eu/conference. No registration fee are requested thanks to European funds of Seventh Framework Programme.