Spring Lecture Series: ‘Pressures on the urban field: Ageing, Migration, Injustice’
curated by Anuschka Kutz (KU Leuven, University of Brighton)
Talk No. 1
Deane Simpson
Socio-demographic Plastics
Salon conversation from 5.30 pm
Lecture at 6.30 pm, auditorium
21st of February 2017
Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels
Paleizenstraat, 65-67 – 1030 Brussels
Everyone is welcome!
We ask for everyone (visitors AND participating students/lecturers of the Faculty of Architecture) to register here.
Deane Simpson is an architect, urbanist and associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture. He is the author of Young-Old. Urban Utopias of an Ageing Society and co-editor of The City between Freedom and Security and the forthcoming Atlas of the Copenhagens.
Titled ‘Socio-demographic Plastics’, his talk unfolds some of the implications for architecture and urbanism of one of the dominant societal transformations taking place – demographic ageing. It identifies the group known as the ‘Young-Old’ as a petri dish for experiments in altered forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and environment – one that produces a field of latent urban and architectural novelty, with both escapist and emancipatory dimensions.
(https://www.facebook.com/events/1819188501668481/)
Spring Lecture Series: Pressures on the urban field: Ageing, Migration, Injustice.
The Spring Lecture series, curated by the International Masters in Architecture, Urban Projects, Urban Cultures Program in Brussels, touches on three important issues which will have a significant impact on our current and future urban (rural) landscapes: Ageing, Migration and Injustice. Over the last decades we have experienced unparalleled shifts in the demographic and migratory patterns of our communities, seen an unprecedented acceleration in the growth of our cities, alongside an increase in urban and rural injustice. These socio-economic, political and cultural shifts impact on our environments and how we inhabit space. Three invited international guests will tackle these issues from inside out, by unfolding particularities, unseen potentials but also challenges as they present themselves in the everyday realm. As the global and local scale are inextricably linked, global issues manifests themselves in the urban and spatial patterns of everyday life and vice versa. In this lecture series, Ageing, Migration and Injustice are not merely terms to discuss and juggle as intellectual academic entities, but as constituents that are attached to actual lives. They are, so to speak, “lived-out” in real time. As such they become realities and practices at the same time. They prompt and probe the status quo of our urban structures, often resisting traditional categorizations of space. They can reset codes and behave in unpredictable and unexpected ways. They offset what we think we know. They undulate between volatile, convivial, viable, drastic, quiet, inventive, emancipatory, suffering, oppressive and gentile modes, creating conflict and communality, sometimes at the same time. As we look more closely at the structures we create on a daily basis, examining particularities of the interrelationships between space and spatial practice, expect the unexpected. The series opens with a talk by Deane Simpson.
Anuschka Kutz (Visiting Professor, KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, International Master of Architecture (Urban Cultures and Urban Practices Program), Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels)