From Thursday May 23rd 2019 to Sunday May 26th 2019 will take place the forum About a City- Rethinking Cities at the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation – Viale Pasubio 5, Milan, as part of the Milano Arch Week. Free entrance !
About a City 2019 – Rethinking cities presents itself as a review of practices aimed at constructing original responses to the needs of contemporary urban inhabitants, through the activation of social and political responsibility processes. Starting from people’s practical experiences allows us to adopt a realistic, dynamic, conscious and reactive approach in addressing constantly evolving needs and to prospect the future that they foreshadow. This innovative building process urgently requires the activation and integration of individuals and communities’ skills in the course of developing a far-sighted vision.
Relying on the tension between this critical situation and rising transformative process, the new edition of the forum About a City 2019 – Rethinking cities will bring to light stories and practices of actors who work to cope with today’s needs, through four days of reflection and confrontation in closed roundtables, talks, debates, dialogues, lectures and performance events.
An articulated program has been designed for an audience represented by:
• Citizens, associations, citymakers and communities, so that they can contribute directly to defining the future whilst ensuring the quality of life of their living space, based on their needs and desires
• Stakeholders and companies, so that they can consider citizens’ needs, sensitivities and imaginations, in conceiving experimental projects and in producing sustainable urban transformations consistent with the identities of the places and anchored to the inhabitants’ stories
• Institutions, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and politicians, since they contribute to the development of new forms of responsable and courageous governance that pay more attention to citizens’ requests and role
Starting on Thursday afternoon with a session of 8 thematic closed tables, in which stakeholders from various backgrounds and competences will discuss many themes amongst which: the needs related to poverty, responsible tourism, the use of technology, mobility as facilitator to urban opportunities, the construction of public edifices, the management of common goods, the promotion of environmental sustainability and the quality of life. All these discussions will help define the resources of “civic capital” necessary to concretize the “right to the city” experience. After an institutional opening, Alfredo Brillemburg, U-TT Caracas, will hold a lecture “Making urban utopias (from peripheries”).It will be followed by the screening of “The adolescence of the cities – Diary of a growing metropolis“, which is the outcome of an annual path of the G. Feltrinelli Foundation, in collaboration with the Cariplo Foundation in the context of Lacittàintorno.
The forum will proceed on Friday and Saturday mornings, with conversations and workshops in panels, structured around three moments of reflection:
1) Borderscapes. Transforming the city based on its needs: to analyse the needs and shape the responses to the crisis of inequalities in populated territories.
2) Commonscapes. Building the city as a pact: to think about the forms of responsibility, co-responsibility and legal-political innovations necessary to a collective construction of urban futures
3) Culturescapes. Designing City Skills and Strengths: to address cities’ economic and human regeneration, based on the skills and abilities of the city inhabitants
A series of scholars, experts, activists as well as an audience of politicians, business representatives, governmental and non-governmental organizations, civil society and the third sector will help to compose a lexique of terms about cities and illustrate it with stories.
Sunday will be devoted to the theme Arts in the city and will host artistic performance related to urban regeneration.