In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City presents an collection of essays... more In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City presents an collection of essays, interviews, and projects that deal with the role of public space within contemporary American urbanism. This publication, the result of a conference held at Princeton University, examines the physical, social, and political impact of public/collective space through three key aspects: ownership, density, and the right of access within the city. Contributors come from a range of disciplines, bringing together perspectives of architects, politicians, academics, and non-profit advocates. Contrary to urban studies practitioners that focus their efforts on issues such as zoning, building codes, and land use policy, this publication focuses on the relevance and potential of architecture - as a practice of programming and form making - to transform the city and change our conception of public space.
Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development
PurposeCities are facing challenges that dramatically affect their social and physical landscapes... more PurposeCities are facing challenges that dramatically affect their social and physical landscapes, leading to the increase of urban segregation and polarization. One response to these challenges is adaptive reuse, yet, in heterogeneous communities, these adaptations are often a source of conflict, because local actions often lack an integrative approach, leading to further exclusion. In this paper the authors explore the potential of adaptive reuse of urban heritage as a planning tool to support inclusiveness and heterogeneity.Design/methodology/approachThe city of Acre is used as a case study, where different scenarios for urban heritage are proposed and tested among stakeholders through interviews. These aim to explore how adaptive reuse processes can lead to the inclusion or exclusion of certain groups and how design interventions in historic urban landscapes challenge the way the current disconnected historic and urban layers interact.FindingsThe paper presents the commonalities...
In the Palestinian city of Nazareth, visitors, passers-by and inhabitants incessantly experience ... more In the Palestinian city of Nazareth, visitors, passers-by and inhabitants incessantly experience the city's urban voids; left-over spaces in-between a multiplicity of urban patches, sites that have been under dispute, that belong to many or to none. Sites where construction has start- ed but was interrupted, and frozen in time, urban squares and plazas where global tension dominates the streetscape. Properties where the family owning the land has grown so big it becomes impossible to reach an agreement on future plans. Over designed simulacra of the Italian piazza as a foreign visitor in the urban fabric, side by side with fields of an uncultivated and uninhabited landscape interrupting a dense and vibrant urban context, sometimes re-claimed temporarily by informal construction, graffiti, or wild growth of local species.
... Bruno Latour, 'From Realpolitik to Dingpolitick or How to make things Public&#x2... more ... Bruno Latour, 'From Realpolitik to Dingpolitick or How to make things Public', in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA, and London), 2005, pp 1444. 15. ...
The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12)
The Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) recommendations adopted by UNESCO in 2011 serve as an instrume... more The Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) recommendations adopted by UNESCO in 2011 serve as an instrument to respond to challenges to cultural heritage in urban environments faced by rapid urbanization, climate change, and urban conflict. It outlines the knowledge and planning tool emphasizing on the documentation and mapping of landscape characteristics to facilitate decision-making processes within a framework of sustainable development. Mapping typically precedes planning and design processes and methods of visually representing risks and vulnerabilities of the territory and formulating them in light of sustainable development of the area, can offer different perspectives to stakeholders and institutions albeit is practiced in limited capacities and innovation. The article explores eidetic mapping as a tool for visually representing diachronicity and sociospatial configurations HULs to aid the decision-making process. The case study of the ancient port town of Jaffa, Israel serves as a testing ground for the proposed method, documenting the diachronous evolution, spatial and socioeconomic attributes, and testing its relevance for a new sustainable urban design approach to complex historic urban environments. As this research is based on historical information, the article is categorized as qualitative research with a descriptive-analytic approach while the combination with digital tools takes a heuristic approach. The paper will discuss how the research processed data from primary sources of old maps, photographs, and other information and explorations through visualizations. The above experiment using archival records and integrating them with GIS tools as an integral part of the HUL approach, reveals the potential of what can be termed as eidetic mapping method in the process of sustainable and resilient urban design and planning for historic urban environments. The potential of this hybrid form of geo-spatial analysis of a historic urban landscape, documenting and reconstructing its palimpsest of information, of spatial configurations and their diachronic social and cultural evolution is presented.
To close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion with Stan Alle... more To close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion with Stan Allen, Margaret Crawford, Marcel Smets and Sarah Whiting, and put some provocative questions to them: What constitutes public space in the contemporary city? Can the public sphere still exist in the urban context? Should public space be fought for by architects and urban designers? Or, as Allen proposes, is it the landscape architects alone who have been quick to realise the potential of the empty spaces in our cities as a ripe terrain for change? Text
Editorial (Helen Castle) Introduction : Urbanism Without Density (Rafi Segala and Els Verbakel) T... more Editorial (Helen Castle) Introduction : Urbanism Without Density (Rafi Segala and Els Verbakel) The Public and the V2 (Bruce Robbins) Terminal Distribution (Albert Pope) Public Lifestyle in the Low-Density City (Alex Wall) Old Dispersion and Scenes fro the Production of Public Space The Constructive Margins of Secondarity (Bruno De Meulder) Walter and Asphalt The Project of Isotropy in the Metropolitan Region of Venice (Paola Vigano) Intermittent Cities. On Waiting Spaces and How to Inhabit Transforming Cities (Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti) String Block Vs. Superblock Patterns of Dispersal in Chain (Kjersti Monson) In Our Beautiful Future (Martha Rosler) Archipelago of the Negev Dessert A Temporal/Collective Plan for Beer Sheva, Israel (Refi Segal) Peripheral Landscapes, El Caracol, Mexico City (Jose Castillo) Urban Voids: Grounds for Change. Reimagining Philadelphia's Vacant Lands (Deenah Loeb) Urban [IM]plants. Tactics for Recombining Landscape and Collective Space in Bonh...
When dwelling on horizontality as a viewpoint by which we look at contemporary cities, we may thi... more When dwelling on horizontality as a viewpoint by which we look at contemporary cities, we may think in very literal terms. We may imagine a homogeneously distributed, spread out, low rise city without borders, crawling across the territory and seeking benign grounds for it to prosper and multiply, fed by market forces. Alternatively, horizontality serves as a relative term characterizing the ratio between the planes of a 3-dimensional space whereby the x-y plane prevails. From this perspective, the horizontal characteristics of the contemporary urban condition become apparent only when zooming out and looking across the terrain at an ever-expanding built environment. This broader approach allows for a complex definition of horizontality, whereby new urban layers are grafted upon previous layers, 21st century configurations of the territory are added upon postmodern, modernist, 19th century, renaissance and medieval urban tissues, and interact with one another not unlike the accumula...
In 1952, the European Community of Steel and Coal (ECSC) invited applications from cities of memb... more In 1952, the European Community of Steel and Coal (ECSC) invited applications from cities of member states to host the ECSC's institutions and its future organizations. A range of small and internationally unknown cities located in border areas submitted their candidacies. However, after a series of exasperating and endless debates, the ministers representing the ECSC's member states agreed to postpone the choice to a later date and to temporarily settle in the city of Luxembourg, while Strasbourg would host the European Parliament. Joined in 1957 by the European Economic Community and Euratom, the ECSC renewed its invitation in 1958, this time with the hope of establishing a permanent seat. Again several member state cities submitted applications ranging from elaborate packages including detailed urban schemes for the future European seat to tourist brochures published by the National Chamber of Commerce. From these applications, the image of a new urbanity emerged, in parallel to the existing city and inhabited by the newborn 'European citizen'. During the same period, several architecture competitions expressed a similar interest in developing new urban and architectural models for a unified Europe, such as the 1954-55 Architecture competition for a European district near Saarbrücken, the 1956-57 Competition for the Place des Nations, Geneva, the 1957-58 Prix de Rome for a European Pantheon and the 1957-58 Hauptstadt Berlin architecture competition for the center of Berlin. This dissertation studies a particular moment in postwar European history representing a crossroads in the relationship between urbanism and the nation-state. With the postwar crisis of the nation-state and at the same time a fast-changing European city, the discourse that developed around the question of a seat for the European Institutions raised a set of fundamental questions about the connection between cities and citizens at a European scale. A new notion of a ii transnational European city emerged and developed based on three essential political and spatial concepts: the void, the network and the platform. They will form the structure of a research project looking across a wide variety of materials from protocols of the European institutions to sketches by individual architects.
In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City presents an collection of essays... more In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City presents an collection of essays, interviews, and projects that deal with the role of public space within contemporary American urbanism. This publication, the result of a conference held at Princeton University, examines the physical, social, and political impact of public/collective space through three key aspects: ownership, density, and the right of access within the city. Contributors come from a range of disciplines, bringing together perspectives of architects, politicians, academics, and non-profit advocates. Contrary to urban studies practitioners that focus their efforts on issues such as zoning, building codes, and land use policy, this publication focuses on the relevance and potential of architecture - as a practice of programming and form making - to transform the city and change our conception of public space.
This process of growth and redistribution has been partially described by terms such as 'sprawl',... more This process of growth and redistribution has been partially described by terms such as 'sprawl', 'suburbs' (with roots in the American context), 1 'wild living' and the 'diffused city' ('citta diffusa'-mostly referring to the European context). 2 Dispersal functions as an umbrella term for these phenomena, by zooming out and describing them as part of a larger global tendency. In this context, Cities of Dispersal can be recognised as emerging types of low-density environments: decentralised, heterogeneous, and radically different from traditional definitions of the city in their spatial organisation and patterns of growth. 3 Between 1960 and 1990, the population in more than 200 American cities increased by 47%, while urbanised land increased by 107%, resulting in a density decrease of 28%. Statistics from David Rusk, Cities Without Suburbs, Woodrow Wilson Center Press (Washington), 1995 Throughout these physical transformations of the urban environment, the notion of public space has not remained unaltered. Public space has long been a decisive factor in our understanding of the city. Furthermore, we can say that the notion of the public itself, even if by virtue of imagination, has been essential for any act of urban design or planning. 4 It is therefore inevitable to ask: What is the place and role of public space in new dispersed urban environments? How have dispersed urban conditions changed the notion of public? And what are the current notions of the public that influence the way we conceive cities?
Forum on Urbanizing World and UN Human Habitat …, 2002
This paper is to be seen as an abstract of the urban design project developed as our final design... more This paper is to be seen as an abstract of the urban design project developed as our final design project at the Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design Program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University, New ...
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2010
This book addresses a long overdue need to extend contemporary 'global city (region)' discourse t... more This book addresses a long overdue need to extend contemporary 'global city (region)' discourse to include major cities of the southern hemisphere. For too long, separate literatures and narratives have divided urban studies, with 'city region' responses to globalization in the economically developed Northern and Western worlds largely considered in isolation from work in development studies which has focused on the problematic of 'mega-city' growth in the global 'South'. Klaus Segbers' book directly addresses this disjunction by considering recent developments in four Southern city regions in the context of global cities theorization: Johannesburg, South Africa; Mumbai/ Bombay, India; São Paulo, Brazil; and Shanghai, China. The book is organized into six chapters. Its four main chapters, 2-5, each of which contains separate essays on all four city regions, are introduced by Segbers (chapter 1) and key impressions from across the collective of contributions are compared in a final concluding essay by Simon Raiser and Krister Volkmann (chapter 6).
In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City presents an collection of essays... more In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City presents an collection of essays, interviews, and projects that deal with the role of public space within contemporary American urbanism. This publication, the result of a conference held at Princeton University, examines the physical, social, and political impact of public/collective space through three key aspects: ownership, density, and the right of access within the city. Contributors come from a range of disciplines, bringing together perspectives of architects, politicians, academics, and non-profit advocates. Contrary to urban studies practitioners that focus their efforts on issues such as zoning, building codes, and land use policy, this publication focuses on the relevance and potential of architecture - as a practice of programming and form making - to transform the city and change our conception of public space.
Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development
PurposeCities are facing challenges that dramatically affect their social and physical landscapes... more PurposeCities are facing challenges that dramatically affect their social and physical landscapes, leading to the increase of urban segregation and polarization. One response to these challenges is adaptive reuse, yet, in heterogeneous communities, these adaptations are often a source of conflict, because local actions often lack an integrative approach, leading to further exclusion. In this paper the authors explore the potential of adaptive reuse of urban heritage as a planning tool to support inclusiveness and heterogeneity.Design/methodology/approachThe city of Acre is used as a case study, where different scenarios for urban heritage are proposed and tested among stakeholders through interviews. These aim to explore how adaptive reuse processes can lead to the inclusion or exclusion of certain groups and how design interventions in historic urban landscapes challenge the way the current disconnected historic and urban layers interact.FindingsThe paper presents the commonalities...
In the Palestinian city of Nazareth, visitors, passers-by and inhabitants incessantly experience ... more In the Palestinian city of Nazareth, visitors, passers-by and inhabitants incessantly experience the city's urban voids; left-over spaces in-between a multiplicity of urban patches, sites that have been under dispute, that belong to many or to none. Sites where construction has start- ed but was interrupted, and frozen in time, urban squares and plazas where global tension dominates the streetscape. Properties where the family owning the land has grown so big it becomes impossible to reach an agreement on future plans. Over designed simulacra of the Italian piazza as a foreign visitor in the urban fabric, side by side with fields of an uncultivated and uninhabited landscape interrupting a dense and vibrant urban context, sometimes re-claimed temporarily by informal construction, graffiti, or wild growth of local species.
... Bruno Latour, 'From Realpolitik to Dingpolitick or How to make things Public&#x2... more ... Bruno Latour, 'From Realpolitik to Dingpolitick or How to make things Public', in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA, and London), 2005, pp 1444. 15. ...
The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12)
The Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) recommendations adopted by UNESCO in 2011 serve as an instrume... more The Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) recommendations adopted by UNESCO in 2011 serve as an instrument to respond to challenges to cultural heritage in urban environments faced by rapid urbanization, climate change, and urban conflict. It outlines the knowledge and planning tool emphasizing on the documentation and mapping of landscape characteristics to facilitate decision-making processes within a framework of sustainable development. Mapping typically precedes planning and design processes and methods of visually representing risks and vulnerabilities of the territory and formulating them in light of sustainable development of the area, can offer different perspectives to stakeholders and institutions albeit is practiced in limited capacities and innovation. The article explores eidetic mapping as a tool for visually representing diachronicity and sociospatial configurations HULs to aid the decision-making process. The case study of the ancient port town of Jaffa, Israel serves as a testing ground for the proposed method, documenting the diachronous evolution, spatial and socioeconomic attributes, and testing its relevance for a new sustainable urban design approach to complex historic urban environments. As this research is based on historical information, the article is categorized as qualitative research with a descriptive-analytic approach while the combination with digital tools takes a heuristic approach. The paper will discuss how the research processed data from primary sources of old maps, photographs, and other information and explorations through visualizations. The above experiment using archival records and integrating them with GIS tools as an integral part of the HUL approach, reveals the potential of what can be termed as eidetic mapping method in the process of sustainable and resilient urban design and planning for historic urban environments. The potential of this hybrid form of geo-spatial analysis of a historic urban landscape, documenting and reconstructing its palimpsest of information, of spatial configurations and their diachronic social and cultural evolution is presented.
To close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion with Stan Alle... more To close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion with Stan Allen, Margaret Crawford, Marcel Smets and Sarah Whiting, and put some provocative questions to them: What constitutes public space in the contemporary city? Can the public sphere still exist in the urban context? Should public space be fought for by architects and urban designers? Or, as Allen proposes, is it the landscape architects alone who have been quick to realise the potential of the empty spaces in our cities as a ripe terrain for change? Text
Editorial (Helen Castle) Introduction : Urbanism Without Density (Rafi Segala and Els Verbakel) T... more Editorial (Helen Castle) Introduction : Urbanism Without Density (Rafi Segala and Els Verbakel) The Public and the V2 (Bruce Robbins) Terminal Distribution (Albert Pope) Public Lifestyle in the Low-Density City (Alex Wall) Old Dispersion and Scenes fro the Production of Public Space The Constructive Margins of Secondarity (Bruno De Meulder) Walter and Asphalt The Project of Isotropy in the Metropolitan Region of Venice (Paola Vigano) Intermittent Cities. On Waiting Spaces and How to Inhabit Transforming Cities (Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti) String Block Vs. Superblock Patterns of Dispersal in Chain (Kjersti Monson) In Our Beautiful Future (Martha Rosler) Archipelago of the Negev Dessert A Temporal/Collective Plan for Beer Sheva, Israel (Refi Segal) Peripheral Landscapes, El Caracol, Mexico City (Jose Castillo) Urban Voids: Grounds for Change. Reimagining Philadelphia's Vacant Lands (Deenah Loeb) Urban [IM]plants. Tactics for Recombining Landscape and Collective Space in Bonh...
When dwelling on horizontality as a viewpoint by which we look at contemporary cities, we may thi... more When dwelling on horizontality as a viewpoint by which we look at contemporary cities, we may think in very literal terms. We may imagine a homogeneously distributed, spread out, low rise city without borders, crawling across the territory and seeking benign grounds for it to prosper and multiply, fed by market forces. Alternatively, horizontality serves as a relative term characterizing the ratio between the planes of a 3-dimensional space whereby the x-y plane prevails. From this perspective, the horizontal characteristics of the contemporary urban condition become apparent only when zooming out and looking across the terrain at an ever-expanding built environment. This broader approach allows for a complex definition of horizontality, whereby new urban layers are grafted upon previous layers, 21st century configurations of the territory are added upon postmodern, modernist, 19th century, renaissance and medieval urban tissues, and interact with one another not unlike the accumula...
In 1952, the European Community of Steel and Coal (ECSC) invited applications from cities of memb... more In 1952, the European Community of Steel and Coal (ECSC) invited applications from cities of member states to host the ECSC's institutions and its future organizations. A range of small and internationally unknown cities located in border areas submitted their candidacies. However, after a series of exasperating and endless debates, the ministers representing the ECSC's member states agreed to postpone the choice to a later date and to temporarily settle in the city of Luxembourg, while Strasbourg would host the European Parliament. Joined in 1957 by the European Economic Community and Euratom, the ECSC renewed its invitation in 1958, this time with the hope of establishing a permanent seat. Again several member state cities submitted applications ranging from elaborate packages including detailed urban schemes for the future European seat to tourist brochures published by the National Chamber of Commerce. From these applications, the image of a new urbanity emerged, in parallel to the existing city and inhabited by the newborn 'European citizen'. During the same period, several architecture competitions expressed a similar interest in developing new urban and architectural models for a unified Europe, such as the 1954-55 Architecture competition for a European district near Saarbrücken, the 1956-57 Competition for the Place des Nations, Geneva, the 1957-58 Prix de Rome for a European Pantheon and the 1957-58 Hauptstadt Berlin architecture competition for the center of Berlin. This dissertation studies a particular moment in postwar European history representing a crossroads in the relationship between urbanism and the nation-state. With the postwar crisis of the nation-state and at the same time a fast-changing European city, the discourse that developed around the question of a seat for the European Institutions raised a set of fundamental questions about the connection between cities and citizens at a European scale. A new notion of a ii transnational European city emerged and developed based on three essential political and spatial concepts: the void, the network and the platform. They will form the structure of a research project looking across a wide variety of materials from protocols of the European institutions to sketches by individual architects.
In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City presents an collection of essays... more In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City presents an collection of essays, interviews, and projects that deal with the role of public space within contemporary American urbanism. This publication, the result of a conference held at Princeton University, examines the physical, social, and political impact of public/collective space through three key aspects: ownership, density, and the right of access within the city. Contributors come from a range of disciplines, bringing together perspectives of architects, politicians, academics, and non-profit advocates. Contrary to urban studies practitioners that focus their efforts on issues such as zoning, building codes, and land use policy, this publication focuses on the relevance and potential of architecture - as a practice of programming and form making - to transform the city and change our conception of public space.
This process of growth and redistribution has been partially described by terms such as 'sprawl',... more This process of growth and redistribution has been partially described by terms such as 'sprawl', 'suburbs' (with roots in the American context), 1 'wild living' and the 'diffused city' ('citta diffusa'-mostly referring to the European context). 2 Dispersal functions as an umbrella term for these phenomena, by zooming out and describing them as part of a larger global tendency. In this context, Cities of Dispersal can be recognised as emerging types of low-density environments: decentralised, heterogeneous, and radically different from traditional definitions of the city in their spatial organisation and patterns of growth. 3 Between 1960 and 1990, the population in more than 200 American cities increased by 47%, while urbanised land increased by 107%, resulting in a density decrease of 28%. Statistics from David Rusk, Cities Without Suburbs, Woodrow Wilson Center Press (Washington), 1995 Throughout these physical transformations of the urban environment, the notion of public space has not remained unaltered. Public space has long been a decisive factor in our understanding of the city. Furthermore, we can say that the notion of the public itself, even if by virtue of imagination, has been essential for any act of urban design or planning. 4 It is therefore inevitable to ask: What is the place and role of public space in new dispersed urban environments? How have dispersed urban conditions changed the notion of public? And what are the current notions of the public that influence the way we conceive cities?
Forum on Urbanizing World and UN Human Habitat …, 2002
This paper is to be seen as an abstract of the urban design project developed as our final design... more This paper is to be seen as an abstract of the urban design project developed as our final design project at the Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design Program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University, New ...
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2010
This book addresses a long overdue need to extend contemporary 'global city (region)' discourse t... more This book addresses a long overdue need to extend contemporary 'global city (region)' discourse to include major cities of the southern hemisphere. For too long, separate literatures and narratives have divided urban studies, with 'city region' responses to globalization in the economically developed Northern and Western worlds largely considered in isolation from work in development studies which has focused on the problematic of 'mega-city' growth in the global 'South'. Klaus Segbers' book directly addresses this disjunction by considering recent developments in four Southern city regions in the context of global cities theorization: Johannesburg, South Africa; Mumbai/ Bombay, India; São Paulo, Brazil; and Shanghai, China. The book is organized into six chapters. Its four main chapters, 2-5, each of which contains separate essays on all four city regions, are introduced by Segbers (chapter 1) and key impressions from across the collective of contributions are compared in a final concluding essay by Simon Raiser and Krister Volkmann (chapter 6).
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Papers by Els Verbakel