Revisit the 2017 forum
Missed the 2017 forum? No stress. The inaugural Living Cities Forum can be revisited anytime via our library page.
What drives good urban outcomes? This is a particularly complex question in the context of post-industrial inner city areas, where conventional development models often don’t stack up. The old much-loved football stadium of Feyenoord, which no longer fulfils modern demands, is a good example, situated within Rotterdam's old port area; one of the poorest areas in the country. Gianotten will share the principles behind OMA’s ambitious plan to use a new stadium and its urban surroundings as a catalyst to revitalise a part of the city. Importantly, design is not an applied ‘layer’, but is rather the strategic driver behind the entire urban development.
Rory Hyde provided a sneak preview of his new manual of social, infrastructural, public and domestic strategies for producing diverse, open, inclusive and equitable cities. With a current working title of How to Make the Next City, his forthcoming book will include a series of real world case studies from the frontier of civic governance and design.
Cities are transformed by technology. The elevator and the steel beam helped turn the nineteenth century city into a landscape of high-rise towers, while the car allowed it to thin-out and sprawl a century later. How will today’s digital technology also transform our cities? For Dan Hill the city should’t be viewed through the binary lens of virtual space and the ‘real world’, but rather through a holistic approach to urban thinking. For Hill we have an unparalleled opportunity to transform our cities through the use of “contemporary and forthcoming technologies, allied to appropriately human-centred design and decision-making cultures.”
From a collection of historical and imagined utopias for Los Angeles—like the early 20th century Llano del Rio community to the 2013 film Her—Zeiger pairs these utopian examples with present conditions in the city that provide insight into the ideals and challenges of liveability. Each of the pairings will correspond with a particular factor of liveability, such as: housing, health, culture, infrastructure, environment.
This presentation contrasts the high-culture development of Hong Kong’s West Kowloon District with the emerging sub-cultures of Shenzhen. As curator of ‘Bring Your Own Biennale’, the 2009 Hong Kong Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Marisa Yiu explored how design can mobilise communities and create bridges between diverse user groups. Yiu now helms the Future Vision Foundation, an NGO lead by Design Trust Hong Kong and London’s Royal College of Art.
Minsuk Cho is an architect and founder of Seoul-based firm Mass Studies. Cho has been committed to the discourse of architecture through socio-cultural and urban research and mostly built works, which have been recognised globally, with representative works including the Pixel House, Missing Matrix, Bundle Matrix: S-Trenue, Ann Demeulemeester Shop, Korea Pavilion: 2010 Shanghai World Expo, and Daum Space.1, Osulloc: Tea Stone/Innisfree, Southcape: Clubhouse, and Dome-ino.
Cities such as Melbourne have the potential to be healthy, dynamic and prosperous, but they can also suffer from neglect, over-crowding and poor planning. The morning session will investigate the major factors that define and enable a city to meet the needs and aspirations of its citizens. Our three speakers will consider the role of technology and infrastructure, as well as data and demography, in understanding and designing a better city. In short, this session will look at the city from a macro perspective.
The 2017 Forum's final panel pulled the focus into the fine grain of human experience, social forms and community identity. It investigated the tensions that exist between how cities grow, adapt and change to meet new circumstances (while protecting those qualities and attributes of a city—call it the urban DNA—that are critical to its identity and social form). Viewed through the lens of how cities are experienced and inhabited, this session will posited a more personal account of what a truly “liveable” city looks like.