Organizers: Dr. Ita Heinze-Greenberg, Prof. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Dr. Britta Hentschel and Dr. Harald R. Stühlinger, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich

The nineteenth century produced not only a wealth of ideas about the city, but was also the period of what was probably the largest wave of urbanization yet seen. Urban-planning debates and activities are therefore focusing more intensively than ever on the nineteenth-century city. The founding of the nation states in Europe, industrialization and the increased mobility that went along with them were accompanied by tremendous social changes. The hegemony of the aristocracy was replaced by a self-assured bourgeoisie, and the working class formed into a revolutionary and potentially threatening third force. Participation in the shaping of society - and thus of urban space as well - became the central maxim for the multitude of protagonists involved. New functions - such as government and administrative centres, manufacturing locations and focal points for modern cultural and social life - not only promoted the physical expansion of the developing capitals and metropolises, but also required a new coding of existing structures to enable them to serve as modernized platforms for urban life and city society.

The conference on 'Recoding the City' aims to inquire into the divergent intentions and claims of the new protagonists shaping the city who emerged in the nineteenth century and into the associated mechanisms with which they were able to inscribe themselves into existing urban structures, overwrite them, or even rewrite them if needed. Against the background of escalating competition between cities and vigorous image-building, public space intensified to become a medium that conveyed significance - and it also became a battleground for ideas and demands. Spurred on by new legislation, novel building regulations, emerging manuals on urban design and the building speculation that was particularly rife in the liberal economic system, the appearance of cities changed drastically. The associated new coding and recoding of the city ranged from local interventions such as the erection of monuments, to wide-ranging surgical urban-planning operations that created new contexts of significance within historically developed cities. On the basis of criteria such as public hygiene, security, modern traffic volumes and assertions of prestige status, the historic city was physically modified and charged with symbolism, and was used both as a screen for projecting an ideal image and also as a demarcation line between a wide range of different interests. In parallel with these radical urban upheavals, which were also accompanied by the development of new media such as photography and film, the disciplines of historic monument preservation, urban planning and sociology also emerged.

Proposals would be welcomed on ways of addressing the various mechanisms and strategies involved in 'recoding' and its protagonists and their influence on the field of urban planning and architecture, as well as the radically changing mediality of the nineteenth-century city.

Abstracts are requested with a maximum length of 500 words for papers that may last no longer than 30 minutes. The abstracts should be sent by e-mail to hentschel[at]arch.ethz.ch and stuehlinger[at]arch.ethz.ch