Sunday Times 2
‘Towards New Urbanity-Places for Urban Coherence’
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By Dr. Janaka Wijesundara
Cities, in essence, are complex agglomerations of places. From places for work and places for living, and places for relaxation and enjoyment, today’s cities have grown immensely to provide settings for the complex range of numerous day-to-day activities of people. With multi-faceted neighbourhoods propped up by networks of public services, cities are indeed invaluable cultural incubators. However, due to issues like the world population reaching 07 billion in 2014, and the increasing migration of people to urban centers, many cities of the world are confronted with an array of problems from overcrowding and uncontrolled expansion to issues of livability.
In recent years, ideas of ‘creative cities’, ‘smart cities’, ‘green cities’ and ‘productive cities’ have revisited manifestos for building cohesive and vibrant urban communities and creating cities that thrive. However, these ideas often seem to articulate specific and chosen emphasis and fail to examine cities holistically to address the fundamental issues of livability and life of cities.
Re-invention of the city as the incubator of enjoyable and pleasant, cultured urban life is not a luxury but an undeniable necessity. It is indeed more so for Asian countries that face overwhelming population challenges, while the West and other developed nations face similar issues emanating from the needs of communities struggling with aging infrastructure and sometimes de-population. In this context, establishing new and invigorating visions of urbanism, through urban architectural interventions, enlightened through urban design is an urgent challenge. Cities, People and Places are at the heart of this dilemma and it is only through a holistic understanding of their reciprocal relations, that cities may be re-invented for human habitation of the next century.
New Initiatives and explorations
The Urban Design Program of the Department of Architecture of the University of Moratuwa has been committed to establishing a platform to facilitate the dialogue on issues faced by cities of the world today and network among those who do experiments on Cities, People and Places. It is with this objective that the series of forums on this imperative were conceived and initiated. The first and second International Conferences on Cities, People and Places, ICCPP-2013 and ICCPP-2014 were successfully held in October 2013 and 2014 in Colombo with the presence of a large gathering of local and foreign professionals, academics, researchers, and scientists.
The Urban Design Program of the Architecture Department is quite determined to organize the ICCPP third forum, which demonstrates two significant developments. First, it is an acknowledgement of the relevance of the conference that cuts across the conventional boundaries of disciplines to spearhead the movement of interdisciplinary approach to the scientific study of Cities. Second, it also demonstrates clearly that the new partnerships established since previous years have grown to a solid base now culminating in greater solidarity. It has already enabled the foundation of a network through the University of Moratuwa, focused on cities, people and places.
During the past years in Sri Lanka, especially Colombo City has been implemented with a number of urban improvement programs geared mainly through the state sector interventions. Today we are in a position to revisit these strategies and cases with reference to their successes and failures, positive and negative results. In this context, the focus of the third forum is very much beneficial and relevant to Sri Lanka, through the sharing of experience in urban design and public realm development programs and projects by foreign and local presenters at the conference.
Third International Conference on Cities, People and Places (ICCPP-2015)
The Urban Design Program of the Department of Architecture in conjunction with its national and international academic partners will hold its third International Conference on Cities, People & Places, from October 26th-28th, 2015 on the theme ‘Towards New Urbanity- Places for Urban Coherence’ at the Galadari Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
This conference invites urban researchers to examine the cities from the point of view of urban coherence, through multi-polar approaches of different disciplines. They are asked to interrogate the issues at a variety of scales from the territorial to the urban, and from individual buildings, elements and places to the entire city and the assemblages of cities. ICCPP asks the fundamental question of what are the social, economic, cultural, political and environmental manifestations of seeing the city as a people’s place.
The inauguration ceremony of ICCPP-2015 will be held on October 26th at Galadari Hotel Colombo. The scientific conference held on October 27th at the same venue includes 40 numbers of local and international presentations running in four parallel sessions throughout the day. The keynote speakers at this event are Prof. Chye Kiang Heng, Professor of Urban Design in the University of Singapore, Prof. Sasanka Perera from the South Asian University in India and Archt. Madhura Prematilleke from Sri Lanka. This conference is also open for pre-registered participants from any discipline.
(The writer is Director of Program of Urban Design, Department of Architecture, University of Moratuwa)