Co-opolis: The Collective Production of the City

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.

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?