When: Wednesday 27 April 2016 – 10:30-12:30
Where: University of Sheffield, Arts Tower, room 16.03 (floor 16)
Audience: Open to the public
Widening the debate over the ‘contested’ and the ‘ordinary’ in urban design and planning, this talk, based on an forthcoming article in City, tries to address such concepts whilst engaging with Giorgio Agamben’s powerful notion of paradigms. Considering a range of current urban situations as super, hyper-exceptional cases trapped in the tension between particularism and exceptionalism, the paper reflects on Agamben’s approach to examples - or paradigms - which deeply engage the powers of analogy, enabling discernment between previously unseen affinities among singular objects by stepping outside established systems of classification. The paper suggests a possible new concept, ‘whatever urbanism’, to disentangle the apparent dichotomy between ‘ordinary’ and ‘contested’ as urban labels.
The lecture is hosted by GaSP! together with the MA in Urban Design of the School of Architecture as part of the module Spatial Practice and Development (ARC6977). For further details please contact Beatrice De Carli, b.a.decarli@sheffield.ac.uk
Speaker bio:
Dr Camillo Boano is an architect, urbanist and educator. He is Senior Lecturer at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL, where he directs the MSc in Building and Urban Design in Development, and he is a co-director of UCL Urban Laboratory.
Camillo has over 20 years of experiences in research, consultancies and development work in South America, Middle East, Eastern Europe and South East Asia. His research interests revolve around the encounters between critical theory and radical philosophy with urban and architectural design processes, where collective agency and politics intersect urban narratives and aesthetics.
