Global Design New York University: Cities and Citizenship

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Weltstadt Newspaper: New York | "Cities and Citizenship"

Global Design NYU would like to thank and congratulate all who were in involved in the "Cities and Citizenship" three-day symposium event.

The 5th issue of the Weltstadt Newspaper series discusses the idea of the city in relation to its citizens. The articles brilliantly cover and explore the big themes in the "Cities and Citizenship" event-- themes that involve design, architecture, sociology, urbanism, ecology and identity.

Read the articles to learn what scholars have to say about this topic and see photographs from each of the terrific events.

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The Weltstadt Newspaper Website

Articles from "Cities and Citizenship"

The work by Global Design NYU is on page 3.

Friday, March 28, 2014

GDNYU’s Cities and Citizenship Conference: Citizenship and Democracy in the “Green City”

By Carly A. Krakow

What is the relationship between nature and the city? How are the bounds between a democratic, open-access approach to city development and an urban planning methodology that emphasizes expertise and extensive training negotiated? Is it possible to design spaces as realms of free speech and activism, or is the idea of “designed democracy” antithetical to spontaneous and genuine demonstrations of citizenship?

These are just a few of the questions addressed at March 14^th’s Cities and Citizenship conference, co-organized by Global Design NYU and Parsons the New School for Design as part of the Goethe-Institut’s Weltstadt project. The conference engaged with the ways in which the construction of the city is inextricably linked to the role of the citizen. Drawing on historical understandings of how urban centers have been both geographically and socially delimited, the conference sought to inspire an expanded understanding of the citizen’s role in shaping the 21^st century “green city.”

The panels, moderated by GDNYU co-directors Peder Anker, Louise Harpman, and Mitchell Joachim, and Ioanna Theocharopoulou of Parsons, addressed topics including the role of nature in the built environment; the relationship between designers, architects, activists, and social scientists during the era of globalization; the need for increased infrastructural strength in New York City in the age of global warming; and the function of building codes in the rapidly evolving urban environment. Panelists included Vyjayanthi Rao, Lynette Widder, Tyler Volk, Colin Jerolmack, Eric Sanderson, Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Mariana Mogilevich, Eric Klinenberg, Stephen Duncombe, Andreas Kalyvas, Susanne Schindler, Victoria Marshall, and Susannah Drake.

Stay tuned for an expanded version of our reflections on the conference, forthcoming in the Weltstadt newspaper!!!

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MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."