From the Suburban Challenge to the Productive City

The lecture shows the transition of a particular urban thinking from the city understood as a cultural construct to the city understood as a laboratory. The first takes as its main motive force the detailed description of the city’s cultural realm and how its intellectual restitution can reformulate the urban. The second takes as its main motive force Bruno Latour’s idea of the city that empowers citizenship in order to get a feedback that sets the principles for its development.

For this, 4 winning proposals of the biannual Europan competition are presented. These show 4 different approaches to the construction of the European City in reply to 4 different topics - The Suburban Challenge, The European Urbanity, The Adaptable City and The Productive City - posed in 4 different moments but in the same 2 cities: Vienna and Stavanger. 15 years are between the first and the last, between the certainty of the form and the uncertainty of the strategy as a logical evolution of the architectural fact or what we, as architects and urban planners, must do. In other words, 15 years between an early typical architectural approach that provides a final - and liable to be built - image as the only desirable answer to given conditions and a recent more contemporary approach that enables a “middle-out” experimental process where “top-down” and “bottom-up” strategies intermingle.