Cityscapes: Exploring the Spirit of Urban Identity


Symposium:


Session Title:
  • Mapping the City and Urban Identity

Presentation Title:
  • Cityscapes: Exploring the Spirit of Urban Identity

Presenter(s):


Venue(s):


Abstract:

  • We know a great deal about the problems of contemporary cities: their total lack of flexibility makes of them merely remnants of the very modernization they were meant to lead. However, there is precious little concern for those whom such spaces were built to serve. How do people experience the city? How do they cope with its complexity, size and, most poignantly, the isolation it engenders? This research is framed to uncover how people draw meanings from the built environment and how, in an act of reciprocity, the latter underpins their identity.

    The goal is to develop an original analysis of the role of contemporary cities in shaping and supporting western democracies as achieved by means of an innovative interdisciplinary approach: the interpolation between cinema and architecture. A series of short films will be the final research output, shot in significant metropolitan areas around the world. The first case study is the city of Rome as reinterpreted in a trilogy of films exploring its outstanding relevance to the history of architecture and the contemporary debate.

    This research is set to determine exactly what makes contemporary cities tick from the perspective of generic public engagement. The aims are to identify critical issue and illustrate them through visual means. 3 short films – “Consuming Culture” (20’), “Visual Noise” (20’) and “Historical Limbo” (20’) will be produced in order to investigate 3 different aspects inherent to the first city at issue – Rome, the issues being: mass tourism, surveillance/surveyance, the past/present continuum.

    Tapping into the West’s highly sophisticated appreciation of visualization (i.e., the importance of images for mastering reality), architectural issues will be therefore interpolated with the most sophisticated visual means: cinema. This would not only break the impasse affecting current architectural debate, but also furnish new opportunities to study, understand and improve the complexity of everyday urban life. An innovative, multi-disciplinary approach has therefore been set in place in the form of experimental films, that will be shot in order to grasp and bring to the fore the overlapping between fantasy and reality in the beholder’s mind.

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