Lecture series: rewind, fast forward

LECTURES | Fri. 20.10.2023-24.05.2024 | StadsSalonsUrbains, Brussels

2023/2024 lecture series
rewind, fast forward. unravelling the historical layers and meanings of our built environment

The city is the future? Most definitely! Throughout the last decade many new ideas and insights have been presented in the field of urban studies. At the StadsSalonsUrbains renowned international speakers are invited to present their ideas to a Brussels audience.

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’. 

Lectures take place on Friday evening 17.30-19.30h in the city centre of Brussels. A meeting point for urbanites, just before the weekend starts:

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

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

More info & source: urbanstudies.brussels