PICS - Public Identity and Common Space

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE:
PICS - Public Identity and Common Space
Tools, designs, actions and gazes for a new landscape identity in the public neighbourhoods of the 1960s-‘80s
Call for papers and projects

Conference promoted by the “Living Urban Scape” research group, a basic research investment fund (FIRB) project, Università Roma Tre, Department of Architecture.

Rome – 27 June 2013

Theme and objectives
The quality of life  in the residential peripheries built in Europe between the 1960s and ‘80s has suffered incremental and progressive worsening; the riots striking the peripheral areas of some major European cities, like London, Paris, Glasgow, and Grenoble, in recent years are among symptoms. .
This takes place especially in public neighbourhoods, which show various forms of physical, social and economic trouble that can be diagnosed by observing them through different lenses, including the filter of open spaces. The quality of the open space for living  is  of outstanding importance over how public neighbourhoods are perceived and recognized, inside and out, and its decay is a clear signal of a more generalized unease: the inadequacy of these landscapes’ spatial components conveys the crisis of their underlying civic values.
The hypothesis that PICS (Public Identity and Common Space) intends to verify is that the quality of living in public housing neighbourhoods is a urgent core theme of reflection for designing the contemporary city, and that the design of open space may be a fertile point of operative observation. Regenerating open spaces may be the first step in a recovery strategy that integrates the physical, spatial, and environmental components with social and behavioural ones: spaces for play, recreation, and socialization, they are precious resources for social cohesion, for building communities that are more solid and aware of the civic value of living together. Often located at the peripheral/urban or rural/urban margins, they are boisterous occasions for osmotic passage between different landscapes, where the ecotonal gradients between city and country, or between city and natural environments, in addition to being precious reserves for biodiversity, are workshops for trialling new i
 dentities and figurative expressions.
Aim of the conference is to collect and recount situations, projects and procedures for guiding designers, technicians, officials and residents, in order to improve the liveability of residential peripheries through actions on open spaces.

Thematic sessions:
1 Gazes: explorations, narratives and representations of public housing neighbourhoods.
Experiences of reading, inventive diagnosis, interpretation and recounting.

2 Programmes: policies and projects for renewing the landscapes in public neighbourhoods.
Theoretical or practical experimental (projects), research in regeneration set up or carried out in Europe.

3 Actions: informal practises for reactivating the landscapes in public housing neighbourhoods.
Informal actions, landscape architectures self-built by residents and/or in collaboration with architects or landscape designers, within participatory processes.

Schedule:

• 31 January _call issued
• 8 March_delivery of abstract
• 22 March _notification of acceptance of paper
• 27 April_delivery of full paper
• 27 June_conference

All the selected papers and projects will be published in an instant book to be distributed at the conference’s opening. The best papers will be presented to the audience by the authors.

PARTICIPATION IN THE CONFERENCE
Abstracts may not exceed 3,000 characters, spaces included, may contain at most 2 images and must be sent to the following e-mail address: [email protected]
Abstracts must contain the following elements:
-title
-name of author(s)
-reference session
-3 keywords

Full papers may not exceed 15,000 characters, spaces included, and must follow the reference layout to be sent to all the selected authors.

The official languages are English and Italian.

REGISTRATION FEES
There is a € 120 registration fee for attending the conference. For students and doctoral candidates, the fee is € 80. Registration covers conference attendance and the article’s publication in the dedicated volume.

REFEREE:
Francesco Careri, Paola Di Biagi, Francesco Ghio, Isabella Pezzini, Andrea Vidotto

SCIENTIFIC SECRETARY:
Anna Lambertini, Annalisa Metta, Maria Livia Olivetti

ORGANIZATION:
Silvia Pinci

[email protected]