City as organism: new visions for urban life. 22-26 September 2015. Faculty of Architecture, ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Call for papers (deadline 15 January 2015)
Conceptions of the city have changed significantly in recent years. The character of major infrastructural, residential, commercial and manufacturing developments suggests that current challenges may be a great deal more than a blip in the course of history. Some would argue that the dialectic between the desire to restore theorganicity of urban form and the incoherent reality of the actual city is at the core of some of the finest projects and plans that have been developed. Is this a line of thought that is practicable in urban morphological research and practice? Or should we accept the incoherence of cities as amalgams of fragments? A central theme of the Conference is the ‘reading’ of existing cities in the light of a possible new organicity, comparing viewpoints from different disciplines; from architecture to history and from geography to urban planning. Discussions will deal with a variety of scales, from the territorial to the urban, and from the entire city and constellations of cities to the scale of the individual building.
