BOOK PROPOSAL MARCH 2016 ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION MA HISTORY AND CRITICAL THINKING CECILIA LARREA MIJARES
Zaatari Camp, Jordan. 50,000 inhabitants
This book will start with a brief overview of the development of
demand to be examined, studied, re-thought and questioned, in
Urban Planning as a discipline; from the modernist utopic views
order to keep moving forward and try to get ahead of this
and attempts to find a universal solution, until arriving to our
unstoppable force of human movement. How can we conceive
contemporary situation and questioning whether this practice is
cities in our global situation? What determines what a city is? Is
still alive, or as Rem Koolhaas suggested, it has failed and died.
there a need for a new term or a reinterpretation of our conception of urban life?
In Sigfrid Giedeion´s view “Town planning is possible when different levels of human activity have attained unity and
The analysis of the evolution of this discipline is not researched
equilibrium”. Taking the planning of the city as the point of
through the practice itself or through its results, accomplishments
intersection between singularity and plurality, the book will explore
or projects, but rather through the methods used to arrive at
the variation of these concepts used to define and differentiate
certain proposals or ideas. From the use of the first diagrams to
spaces, activities and their interconnections; how these concepts
contemporary modes of visualizations of data and techniques and
have also evolved with the practice and shifted back and forth
technologies used as strategies to convince and sell. This
from ideas such as “individual vs. collective” to “public vs. private”.
analysis will prove to be useful for professionals of this field, who
These concepts, which according to Paolo Virno are today
are currently dealing with different methods that can be
insufficient to explain the experience of today´s forms of life, have
questioned or compared in order to determine their intentions and
blurred their boundaries and turned into “multitude”, which is
potentials.
defined as “diverse identities, challenged to communicate and act
But, questioning the compositions of cities, as well as
in common while remaining internally different, composed of all
understanding the evolution of the ways in which they were
diverse figures of social production” by Hardt and Negri.
thought, designed and built, is also valuable for the general public,
With this idea as its core, the book will go on to explore the
in the sense that it will lead to reflection on how we came to be
current urban situation in different contexts and how these affect
where we are, how cities became the way they are, and finally to
the possibility or impossibility of city planning, regarding issues
understand the role we each play in these dynamics of singularity
such as population growth, migration, lack of natural resources
and plurality, and how our identities can be defined and shaped,
and other implications for their development. Different types of
or weakened and threatened by the way we live and co-exist with
settlements, different types of communal living. Not always static,
one another.
not always moving, but in permanent growth and evolution;
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