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Culture in Urban Space: Urban Form, Cultural Landscapes, Life in the City
The city cannot be understood in terms of its buildings, infrastructure, and physical geography alone. Urban materiality is inextricably linked with city life: Urban spaces are influenced by the cultures that inhabit them, and urban form shapes these cultures in turn. This conference brings together researchers, planners, designers, and architects from around the globe to explore the mutual influence of urban culture and urban form.
Impacts of past urban planning reverberate long after original rationales have become obsolete: Fortifications (walls, moats, fortresses), coastlines and land reclamation, transport infrastructure (roads, bridges, city gates), and other elements of the built environment structure future development. Aspects of urban form contribute to dividing the city into neighbourhoods, determining which areas flourish while others decay, encouraging shifts from industrial to tourism to leisure uses. The city’s architectures affect the cultures of the people who use them: Different kinds of housing foster different forms of sociality or isolation, and different networked infrastructures promote different pathways to the internal cohesion and/or citywide integration of urban cultures. Whether urban cultural landscapes evolve gradually over time or result from decisive, top-down planning, they reflect and influence the city’s multitude of identities, industries, cultural politics, ethnic relations, and expressive cultures.
Culture in Urban Space allows delegates to contextualise knowledge and engage with the local community through three days of walking-based field trips. On 8-10 April, delegates will explore the morphological and cultural distinctions of Macau Peninsula, visiting diverse neighbourhoods across the city, with an emphasis on the ways in which the urban environment has transformed over the centuries. Conference presentations will take place on 11-12 April at Sofitel Macau at Ponte 16.