'Islands and Insularity: Representing Difference '
- Chair: André Bideau, Universita della Svizzera italiana/Harvard GSD
Islands entertain a specific relationship with power – either intentionally deployed for a community or the product of difference in an evolving social fabric. Within the tradition of utopia, the island provided a metaphor of hope as an ideal form of social or spatial organization. It was an essential metaphor in modernist architecture: discourses of economic productivity, of social welfare and of aesthetic reform all relied upon conceptional abstractions of space. Insularity became a by-product of the functionalist tabula rasa where mass housing was cast as self- sufficient world of aesthetic and social cohesion. Postmodernism turned the representation of difference into a strategic instrument for the reterritorialization of capital: Real estate and urban governance today encourage the production of themed space, a commodity that relies on private investment to stimulate identity and place. Examining the embodiments of a spatial metaphor, this session welcomes multidisciplinary inquiries with either a historical or a contemporary focus. Contributions may relate insularity to the fate of modernist utopias, especially to their transfer to contexts such as the postwar welfare state or the colonial/postcolonial urban realm; to the restructuring of postindustrial cities; to the spatial tactics and symbolic economies of gentrification; to the logics of zoning and real estate; to programs and morphologies triggered by deregulation and Flexible Accumulation. Papers may address the dynamics of intentional or segregated communities. Both case studies and theoretical papers are sought for, with contributions welcomed not only from the disciplines of architecture and urbanism, but also from cultural studies, sociology and geography.
email proposal to: andre.bideau[at]usi.ch