New York, September 26th 2009, 12:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 11:30

Information is, first and foremost, an English-language word with a checkered past -- in hermeneutics, jurisprudence, physics, genetics. Its current use is partly defined by context, communications, and partly by the baggage it carries from its prior incarnations, which are irreconcilable. Those tensions are precisely what lends the word the dynamism it needs to function as it does, as a sort of universal solvent.

New York, September 26th 2009, 11:00

Cold war physical planning is frequently invoked in contemporary discussions about post 9/11 urban planning in the US, but another equally important/pervasive aspect of collaborations between defense planners and urban planners in the Cold War era is forgotten in these discussions. I'll talk about several technology-focused collaborations in the 1960s and suggest why this more expansive definition of Cold War planning history is important and relevant for thinking about cities and war today.

"Que viva Mexico!", is the film Eisenstein came to shoot in Mexico, and he would tragically be excluded from editing it. The film's hybrid images depict Mexican life as a simultaneity of past and present.

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Presentation by Marion von Osten, Katja Reichard, Peter Spillmann (in English)

Throughout the history of human common areas, the park has played the role of both model and stage.

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Marwan Fayed proposes alternative approaches to conventional urban design practices. In Fayed’s interventions, function is not dictated by design, but rather, is ascribed by city inhabitants who constantly reprogram the use of public space. Based on observations of public behaviour, his site-specific applications lend themselves adaptable to the spontaneity of a constantly mutating landscape.

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Mixed-use communities have been a traditional mode of urban habitation. Cairo's historic core is exemplary of such pedestrian environs. In the nineteenth century precincts of the city, people moved on foot, depending sometimes on horses and cattle for the circulation of goods. They resided in buildings that provided space for both domestic life and economic activity.

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Saturday, January 17th, 2009

The “new development paradigm,” integrating at once technical and human rights criteria, is not very new. The long development of human rights norms pertaining to adequate housing and corresponding state obligations dates back some 40 years. What urban technicians in both private and public sectors may discover as new in those norms is their relevance to project implementation.

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Friday, January 16th, 2009
In the nineteenth century, French colonial city planning set up trade and industry ports all over the world. After the Second World War, this expansionist strategy drastically changed and, with liberation struggles against French colonial rule, it finally ended. Establishing a Fordist consumer society in the colonies and in Europe was a major goal of the colonial project, which, as Franz Fanon pointed out, had clear economic incentives.

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Friday, January 16th, 2009
For the last three decades, Cairo has been a battleground for competing urban orders manifest in incoherent planning policies, and often conflicting practices in public space. This presentation offers a historical perspective to the city’s long urban struggle, situating contemporary conditions within recurrent spatial and discursive paradigms of conflict and reconciliation.