FYI: VACANT CITY BOOK

Between 2012 and 2015, the KÉK – Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre invited to Budapest a dozen Dutch practitioners, whose work is organised around the reuse of vacant buildings and areas. By presenting these practices, connecting them to their Budapest counterparts and creating situations of formal and informal exchange, KÉK opened new spaces for thought in the Hungarian architecture, planning and development culture and in civil society. The Vacant City book is the result of these encounters, assembling the key thoughts and experiences of the program’s 3 years.


Offline Purchase
The book can be purchased directly in KÉK’s gallery for 2.000,- Ft.
Address: Budapest, XI. Bartók Béla út 10-12.
Opening times: Monday-Frinday, 9.00-18.00

Online Purchase

In case of requiring an invoice or ordering more than 2 copies to the same Address, please write to lakatlan@kek.org.hu.

Urban Imagineering and the Construction of Cool Cities Workshop - Full Program

Urban Imagineering and the Construction of Cool Cities (Sept. 30 - Oct. 1)
Central European University

Budapest, Hungary

Image is everything. The way people, companies, causes and places are presented is increasingly deemed to be a key to success. City and neighborhood branding has become an urban policy tool; culture, history, aesthetics are consciously and creatively deployed in urban redevelopment projects. Many activities and places which had been considered uninteresting and better to hide have become ‘cool’ and sell well (street food, street art, slum tourism, red-light and entertainment districts, ruin pubs, lofts).

Image is everything. Or, perhaps not?

For more details see:
http://sociology.ceu.edu/events/2015-09-30/urban-imagineering-and-construction-cool-cities-workshop

CFP: Building Bridges: Cities and Regions in a Transnational World

Building Bridges: Cities and Regions in a Transnational World 

3rd - 6th April 2016, Karl-Franzen- University, Graz, Austria

Regional Studies Association Annual Conference 2016

Throughout history, cities and regions have been cornerstones of economic, social and cultural institution building and centres of communication and trade across borders of empires and nations. In a globalised world dominated by multi-level governance and declining economic and political significance of the nation-state, cities and regions are becoming ever more so important in building bridges across nations, supra-national unions, and even continents.

These challenges surpass the usual aspects of integration: it is not sufficient to reduce barriers for the mobility of labour, goods, services and capital, to create a homogenous competitive environment, and a solid monetary system. What is needed in addition are more elements of a new regionalism, which is based on non-hierarchical relationships, on self-government, and on the creation of flexible alliances leading to interregional transnational cooperation. The development of a region is affected by its competitive and complementary relationships with other increasingly distant regions. 

These relationships have to be embedded in an overall structure of relations which encompass the purely economic ones and have strong social, cultural, legal and political dimensions. The objective of the conference is to initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue about the future of a transnational world of urban and regional cooperation. We welcome submissions from researchers, policy makers and practitioners working in all areas of regional analysis.

Special Session’s Proposals

Besides paper presentations we also welcome Special Sessions. A Special Session could be a themed workshop or innovative forms of networking and collaboration. We are open to your ideas and happy to discuss these with you. 

There are two types of Special Sessions:

Open Session: the session organiser proposes the topic and provides a short description for a special session. Delegates can submit their abstracts for this session when they register for the conference.

Closed Session: the session organiser proposes the complete session including all speakers. Other delegates cannot submit their abstracts for this session. Both sessions are open to all delegates to attend as audience.

For more information please visit www.regionalstudies.org/conferences/conference/building-bridges-cities-and-regions-in-a-transnational-world or contact Wanda Miczorek at wanda.miczorek@regionalstudies.org

Exhibition:THE DIALOGIC CITY : BERLIN WIRD BERLIN

The autumn of 2015 marks the second collaborative project between four of Berlin’s leading art institutions: Berlinische Galerie, Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin will present a total of four thematically related and coinciding exhibitions.

The exhibition The Dialogic City : Berlin wird Berlin, planned by Brandlhuber+ Hertweck, Mayfried, reveals perspectives of dialogic behavior in the city in seven chapters; the publication of the same name provides its central point of departure. Going beyond the rudiments of participation, possibilities for combining seemingly irreconcilable differences are sketched from various points of view. The first issue of Dialogic City is dedicated to Berlin, where these antagonisms are more extreme than elsewhere.

Following the subject matter of the publications chapters, seven comments will be installed in the large exhibition room of the Berlinische Galerie. The presentation comprises about 500 models from the Berlinische Galeries architectural collection; in its capacity as federal state museum for architecture, the gallery stores the documentation and models of Berlin building competitions. Due to a lack of funds and manpower, only a small part of the material has been digitalized so far. The exhibition addresses this problem by entering the models that are transported from the depot to the exhibition room into the museum database in the presence of visitors (until 08.11.2015, Fri–Mon 12:00 am to 6:00 pm). An important part of museum work that is usually hidden from the public eye thus becomes visible. On the one hand, the models help to imagine an alternative Berlin, which may be reconstructed on the basis of the competition entries; on the other, they illustrate a history of ideas that continues also in its unimplemented form and which may be used as a source of inspiration for present-day debates about the city.

http://www.berlinischegalerie.de/en/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/stadtbild-brandlhuber/?contentId_=17271&cHash=55b41ee2172758f03512ae92951b0b29

WORKSHOP (Berlin): Urban Heritage und Urban Images: Imagineering Urban Heritage (29-30 Oct.)

Urban Heritage und Urban Images: Imagineering Urban Heritage
Humboldt University of Berlin, 29-30th October 2015

In Cooperation with the Institute for Art – and Image history at the Humboldt University of Berlin

Images of cities have a long history and have long been research objects in art history and related disciplines. But city images, produced for economic purposes, have only been analysed recently, and primarily in the social sciences. The production of city images is conceptualized as Urban Imagineering. This describes a differentiated field of discourses and practices in which above all agents from city branding and urban economy are involved, but also urban politics and architecture, in order to generate specific pictures, narratives and symbols of urbanity. Nevertheless, these city-branding and identity-creating processes are continuously changing and at the same time influencing the self-image of the city: this happens in a matrix of urban images, history, economy and heritage.

In this context, tangible heritage gains a special function: different components of heritage are interpreted anew with the help of history. They are overloaded with different symbols and narratives in order to acknowledge their uniqueness.

Within these frameworks the workshop aims to examine the interaction between image, history and architecture. The following questions are formulated: 

Which interaction exists between the tangible heritage and the production of city images? 

To what extend does history play a role in the process of transformation of heritage into images? 

The workshop intends to introduce and analyze case studies from all over Europe. There will be special focus on cases studies which discuss the following perspectives: 

In the realm of architecture, they focus on the interaction between image, history and materiality in urban space; 

In the realm of social practices, they analyse the constructed and projected images. 

The whole programme of the workshop can be found under the following link:

stadtforschungmeetsheritage.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/urban-imagineering-workshop-programm.pdf

Location: Institue for European Ethnology/Georg-Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies, Humboldt University Berlin

Address: Mohrenstraße 40/41, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Registration is required.

If you would like to register, please send an email to urbanheritage@t-online.de

The Istanbul Arts Biennial / SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms

The Istanbul Arts Biennial SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms opens to the public on 5 September 2015.

“This citywide exhibition on the Bosphorus hovers around a material– salt water –and the contrasting images of knots and of waves."

http://14b.iksv.org/

CFP: Book - Visual Representations and/of Citizenship

Call for papers for Book Essays in edited collection

Deadline: Oct 1, 2015

Co-editors: Corey Dzenko, Ph.D., Monmouth University, cjdzenko@gmail.com; Theresa Avila, Ph.D., Arizona State University, sahibah@hotmail.com

Traditionally defined by an individual’s membership and level of participation within a community, scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm describe how “citizenship” results in access to benefits or rights. Yet citizenship moves beyond political framings. According to Aiwha Ong, cultural citizenship is a “dual process of self-making and being-made” but done so “within webs of power linked to the nation-state and civil society.” Taking citizenship as a political position, cultural process, and intertwining of both, this book seeks essays that examine the role of art and visual culture in the Modern and Contemporary eras.

We seek proposals that engage with the questions: How does citizenship inform artistic and visual practices? And how do images inform citizenship? How do images and the built environment reflect, confirm, or challenge ideals of citizenship across visual media and geographical boundaries? Topics addressed may include, but are not limited to: nation building, civic practices, transnationalism, civil rights, politics of identity, labor, border zones, affects of belonging, and activism as well as resistance to citizenship. Queries are also welcome concerning submission topics.

Essay abstracts (approximately 500 words in length) and a CV should be sent to Dr.Theresa Avila at sahibah@hotmail.com and Dr. Corey Dzenko at cjdzenko@gmail.com by October 1, 2015. Drafts or longer outlines are also welcome at this time.

Selected authors will be notified by November 1, 2015. Full first drafts of essays will be due by December 15, 2015, at the latest.

For those invited to contribute to the book project, essays should be 6,000-8,000 words (author-date system in Chicago style with a list of references, and minimal endnotes, please).

For images, due to space limitations, we ask that only the most relevant images be included.  Image copyright is the responsibility of the author and should be established prior to submitting the final

version of the essay. When submitting final essays, proof of copyright permission will need to be made available.