Concurrent Urbanities

Conference: Concurrent Urbanities 1

Friday, April 17, 2009, 11:00 am to 4:00 pm
Parsons The New School for Design



Kellen Auditorium, Sheila Johnson Design Center
2 West 13 Street, 1st floor
New York City
Free admission

“Concurrent Urbanities 1″ is the first of a series of thematically linked events that bring together designers, artists, architects, urbanists, planners, non-profit and non-governmental organizations, civic and community activists, with government representatives and the private sector, in order to explore the complex production of new urban conditions across the world. The goal of the series is to place global forces in relation to local, situated knowledge and practices so that emerging patterns of urbanity at large can be clearly unearthed and explored. Particular emphasis will be placed on exploring new roles that artists and designers play, and the design theories, methods and techniques of visualization and communication they employ, to encourage radical democratization, forms of social resistance, economic equity, and environmental sustainability.

Speakers for “Concurrent Urbanities 1″ include individuals and groups from the United States and Europe that represent a new generation of design activists whose work proposes a radical remapping of the relationships between urban practices and design through broad participatory design processes, bottom-up organizational approaches, innovative networking, as well as through emergent approaches to field operations.

[text from New School press release. Graphic, Walter Jonas‘ 1963 Intrapolis, from a google image search for ‘Concurrent Urbanities.’ Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]