08/09/2017 Performing the plan and the problem of Urban DesignLectures
The analysis starts with the assumption that the growth and prevalence of neoliberalisation in urban design has not only led to a market logic (credit-debt-relations as the dominant form of relations) to assume primary significance, but has been supported by a regulatory agenda that has emphasised sound financial management as the normal (if not sole) criterion for success (cf. Manzi and Morrison 2017). This has divided project management efforts in Urban Design into basically two camps of affairs which makes the indistinctions of domestic dispute: a) Project Management ® as the highly regularized field primarily concerned with finance and b) Wunschproduktion where the few, who manage to best articulate their perspective towards an issue, provide the hegemonic organisation of how actors are enrolled by framing the issue and thus forcing these actors to develop the false urge to respond to the desires of the few rather than pertinent issues such as, just to give an example, a post-family comunal mode of dwelling or intercultural educational infrastructures. The fACTual (HCU Hamburg and Wohnbund e.V. 2016) aspects of what it means to live today and the professional efforts of urban design have become residualised in the indistinctions of domestic dispute, which more often than not appear in the form of projects.
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Oral presentation in the conference Architecture Connects aae 2017, at Oxford Brookes University.
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