City Street 2 : Street-Forming / Re-Forming: Transforming the 21st Century City Streets

Description

- Member of the Scientific Committee of City Street 2:Transforming the 21st Century City Streets - Chair of Conference Track - T10: Streets: Urban Diversity and Social Justice ____________________________________________________________________________________ Streets connect but also disrupt. Streets are traces of cities’ evolution and of civilizations. In the 21st century, with unprecedented urbanization and the need for planning resilient cities, the impact on streets is tremendous in relation to transport, communication, identities, safety, functions and socio-cultural roles. Queries arise, on whether anticipating or influencing change in the roles and characters of streets should be addressed within pre-determined conventional, professional, and institutional settings or within a broader framework. Defining the need for reforming streets that disrupt to those that connect, this conference asks: to what extent should disciplines be engaged with street progress in terms of theory, practice and education in an era with new social networks, new political springs, new diseases, and new forms of art and culture? To what extent are streets urban arteries seeking to facilitate communication or is there a new complexity of streets, uncertainties, and questions to be addressed? As various actors find ways to express what is going on in streets in terms of their design, use and role in cities, the discussion on streets goes beyond the domain of design and planning. Various aspects of deliberate manifestations of social needs and concerns are addressed within the broader scope of everyday life, politics, economy, technology, communication, to name few. With their ambitions and interests, these actors attempt to reform streets in a versatile global framework, using a wide range of tools based on their backgrounds (internet, writing, painting, filming, installing and so on). Through an international and interdisciplinary exchange of scholarship, the conference provides a platform for the exchange of thoughts on adaptive approaches towards transformed city streets. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Track - T10: Streets: Urban Diversity and Social Justice Description: This track calls for contributions from interested academics and professionals from different sectors and different disciplines within and beyond architecture and urbanism. The objective of the track is to bring participants’ expertise into both academic and strategic discussions that aim to: increase awareness about the value of adopting human-centred approaches in architecture and urban design; increase the flow and exchange of knowledge about exemplars of incorporating social and behavioural issues in design; enable the creation of a community of practitioners, including academics and practicing architects, designers, and others who are willing to promote the notion of urban diversity and social justice in the education and practice of architecture and urban design. Social Justice signifies the fair and proper distribution and availability of opportunities, resources, and privileges within a society. The track therefore aims to build upon debates on people-environment design research and social justice in the city. These debates are currently generating lively worldwide discourse in academic and professional circles and in related disciplines including architecture, urban design, geography, planning, governance and law, and environmental psychology, and other. Urban Diversity and Social Justice insinuate challenging injustice while valuing diversity and redressing the major inequities in societies today. The academic and professional communities have addressed social justice in various forms ranging from advocacy to theorization. For example, in architecture and urban design, theorists advocate the need for integrating knowledge on how to deal with problems and crises associated with special populations that form major segments of contemporary societies such as the children, the elderly, the disabled, the poor, and the underrepresented. In urban studies, geographers and urban sociologists call for considering the notion of ‘the right to the city’ and the socio-economic realities of the urban environment. While there has been a surge in theorizing social justice as it relates to the built environment, little attention has been paid to the root causes of the injustices that continue to characterize the contemporary urban context, their impact, and the ways in which such an important field can be addressed effectively in architectural and urban research, education, and practice. The outcomes of the track will offer new insights into the current status of, and potential barriers to, integrating social justice in the process of creating built environments; a better understanding of urban diversity and social justice as they relate to the everyday built environment and their contribution to social sustainability in various contexts; ways in which they can be introduced in architectural and urban design curricula; and a clear examination of possible tools for the application into professional design practice. These insights will have important implications on how urban diversity and social justice-based built environment education and practice can contribute to enhancing equality while avoiding spatial injustices. ____________________________________________________________________________________

Period	1 Oct 2015 - 11 Nov 2016
Event type	Conference
Location	Beirut, Lebanon