Call for proposals

Megalopolises, metropolises, towns in the countryside, shrinking towns:

what “imaginary world”  for the city of tomorrow?

This 4th edition of the ICHT international symposium "Imagining: Building and Inhabiting the Earth" will be held in Saint-Etienne in October 2021. It aims to continue and deepen the questions, themes, and teachings of the three previous editions. It will focus on  the question of “imaginaires” associated with urbanity and their role in the inhabited world. Conceived in 2014, jointly by Brazilian and French researchers, the ICHT is alternately organized, at São Paulo (USP) Universidade in Brazil and at the University of Lyon (UDL) in France, exploring comparative perspectives, cross experiences and exchanges between both Lyon/Saint-Etienne and São Paulo metropolises.

Thus, “awakening imaginaires” associated with urbanity through the prisms of 21st century's transitions, issues, dynamics, and paradigms will come down to:

• Characterizing what these here called ‘imaginaires,’ immaterial and material forms are.
• Identifying what these same ‘imaginaires’ are producing as to ways of feeling our urban environment and how imagination is framing, guiding, and enabling this experience;
• Analyzing what the register of the ‘imaginaire’ is producing as anchors, aspirations, projections or even utopias for individuals, groups and societies;
• Identifying how individual and collective practices, whether hegemonic and non-hegemonic, in their diversity, are producing new ‘imaginaires’ and/or enriching existing ones.

Three axes are proposed to achieve these objectives. The forthcoming Symposium’s reflections could be fit in one of them, at the crossroads of some of them or even free from them:

Axis 1: IMAGINAIRES AND PRACTICES IN THE URBAN CONTEXT :

Nowadays, a certain poetics of the urban embodied in buildings, each more daring than the other, concept stores where everything can be experienced, festive spaces or reinvested wasteland. This poetics refers to a kind of re-enchantment of the world, an invitation to experience the city as a party, an atmosphere, a mood. The urban experience of a specific city or of urbanity in general is, however, diverse and conflicting, taking on the aspects of a series of performances involving corporality, the whole being, and therefore also stigmatization, exclusion and violence. Nevertheless, alternatives are emerging and are mobilizing professionals, activists and/or, more broadly, city dwellers who also want to live better on a daily basis or to re-enchant their living environment, investing places where new ways of living are imagined. How have contemporary urban ‘imaginaires’ been enriching the daily sensitive experience and, in return, how have these ordinary experiences enriched contemporary urban ‘imaginaires’?

Axis 2: IMAGINAIRE FACING THE CHALLENGES AND TRANSITIONS OF THE 21^st CENTURY:

Men and women install and inhabit “a” world when building different relationships with his environment. Today, this world would be characterized by a loss of meaning of this dynamic relationship, resulting in a de-linking with the physical, cultural and symbolic substrates that give meaning to existence. Arising dystopia urban models based on isolation and separation have become widespread: gated communities, building walls, white flights responding to the communitarisation of some city centers. The socio-spatial symptoms of inequality and exclusion are obvious: growth of the homeless population or of those living in cars, domination of militias, and even trafficking in some marginalized communities, etc.).

What are then the contemporary urban imaginaires around the community, around the common and shared and what, on the other hand, is private, exclusive, privileged? At the same time, we can observe the renewal of cooperative movements among groups of inhabitants, occupations, the blossom of  urban space integrated agriculture,  alternative agricultural production activities by land or landless groups, non-domesticated animal species come back, etc. What are the roles of nature and its specific imaginaires in our urban environments, in our private and collective gardens, our squares, parks and landscapes? And what future roles to come ? How have the specific 21st century issues, transitions and questions changed the current imaginaires and those of the future of the city? How can imaginaires, sensibilities, affects and individual experiences be mobilized to found and build the future of our inhabited spaces?

Axis 3: ART(S), CITY, IMAGINAIRE AND IMAGINATION:

Art is a fertile ground in terms of image production and imaginaires. Arts (carving, painting, music, literature, photography, cinema, comics), performances and installations, digital arts, hybrid or street art, all contribute to the production of images and city’s imaginaire. These will nourish philosophical reflections, architectural and urban thinking, the taste and practices of literate urbanites. Depending on art and on the period, real imaginaire positions are refined and combined, and art invades the city and the social field. Increasing and more diverse artistic productions are engaged in urban life alternative practices (street arts, performances, backed up collaborative projects, etc.), in urban narratives creation  exploring critical and propositive relationships with the city’s sensitive experience and with the web. What continuities, gaps, ruptures, conflicts, contradictions, speculations, and explorations are at work to invigorate our imaginations and enrich our imaginaires of the city?

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The ICHT 4th conference “Imagining: Building and Inhabiting the Earth” will be hybrid, both face-to-face and remote as well as open to the general public. Thus, researchers, urban actors, artists, etc. are invited to come and share their questions about urban images and memories in whatever their forms. This event will encourage dialogue and interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and even a-disciplinary approaches in order to emphasize the important place of social imaginaires in the understanding  and transformation of the Inhabiting world. In this perspective, it will be opened to the associative, professional, institutional and (inhabitant )spheres as well as community dwellers.

The contributions, whether theoretical, methodological, practical, experiences’ feedbacks or even more exploratory, may take different formats, from communication to a round table (short interventions), from a poster to the presentation of a film, an in-situ workshop or an artistic performance.

They will be composed of a short summary according to the site’s model:  https://urbanimaginary.sciencesconf.org/user/submissions and can be proposed in French, Portuguese, English or Spanish. To access this model and the submission tab, a sciencesconf.org account is required.

To create an account : https://www.sciencesconf.org/user/createaccount

Proposals must be sent according to the instructions available on the website at https://urbanimaginary.sciencesconf.org/user/submissions before 17/05/2021.

The proposals selected from a double-blind evaluation will be communicated by the beginning of July 2021 at the latest on the ICHT website.

Following the conference, some of them will be published in a publication, the details of which (book or journal issue) will be specified at a later date.

For more information, check the ICHT 2021 website at : https://urbanimaginary.sciencesconf.org/

If you have any questions: colloque.icht2021@st-etienne.archi.fr