Co-opolis: The Collective Production of the City

Zürich
Switzerland
As urbanization intensifies all over the world, so do contestations over how city space is produced.Citizens, politicians, urban designers and architects become increasingly aware of the fact that the city can no longer be solely developed as the playing field of private interests or of state ideologies. Instead, they propose to look upon the production of the city as a ‘common matter’, guided by common codes and the care for common resources.
This colloquium aims to explore the collective production of the city from two angles. Firstly, it examines how the city may be understood as a matter of ‘common codes’, a set of implicit rules that represent shared cultural beliefs and allows urban designers and architects to contribute to the common good. Secondly, it probes into the ways that ‘common actors’, such as housing cooperatives and neighbourhood associations with interest in shared resources, provide alternative, often more creative ways of producing the city than the predominant logics of the state and the market.

The colloquium takes place on 5 October 2021, from 14.00 – 18.00 at ETH Zurich.

Guest speakers:

  • Prof. Eve Blau, Harvard GSD: Architecture As Common Actor
  • Prof. Monique Eleb, Paris-Malaquais: Evolution des Usages dans l’Habitat et Conception (in French)
  • Prof. Jonathan Sergison, Accademia di Mendrisio: Urban Husbandry
  • Andreas Hofer, Director IBA’27: How to Co-Create?
Registration takes place until Friday 24th September 2021 with Claudia Gebert: gebert@nsl.ethz.ch. More information can be found here.

Share this post

News from the field

Fondation Le Corbusier’s Research Grants

If exhibitions, publications and conferences testify of the Corbusean activity, it is research and academic work that enrich and renew the approach. These grants are intended to stimulate new fields of research but also to highlight lesser known aspects of Le...

Buell Center Research and Teaching Fellow

The Buell Center at Columbia University seeks a recent doctoral recipient to join its intellectual community for a 21-month fellowship as a “Buell Center Research and Teaching Fellow.” Ideal candidates will be scholars of the built environment who are beginning an...

Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Université libre de Bruxelles

At the Faculty of Architecture of the ULB there is a full-time postdoctoral research assistant position assisting researchers at the ULB in writing and submitting research projects in the field of architecture and urban planning, in collaboration with external,...