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• 05 sep 2014

  Venice

  Call for papers - Urban studies

  Experimental and alternative urbanism in the MENA region: building a critical and ‘political’ research on the ‘new’ modes of making the city

  Italian Association for Middle Eastern Studies (SeSaMO) Annual Conference - Panel 12

  This panel focuses on the renewed forms to build the city in the MENA region (‘environmental planning’, ‘resilient urbanism’, ‘responsive urbanism’, participatory and ‘collaborative’ initiatives, ‘sustainable’ urbanism…). The panel will tackle two types of spaces: informal settlements, where experimental forms and new methods are at work, and major eco-projects which have adopted in recent years ecological processes, along with global strategies. The major research hypothesis is that the MENA region shows at least since the 2000s new forms of urbanism that, to varying degrees, bring weak but maybe harbinger/forerunner signals of change and innovation, driven by the concepts of environment and sustainability. This is valid for both urban governance and the theoretical underpinnings of it, whereby professional training and the learning ways of doing, thinking and working on the city, shows some progressive changes. The panel will seek to understand why, however, the MENA seems to experience difficulties in ‘refreshing its software’ on regional, national and local theory and practice of urban planning. 

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