Le colloque-exposition international invite les chercheurs-créateurs des domaines du design et disciplines connexes à contribuer à la réflexion sur le rôle de l’inventaire et de l’invention dans l’investigation de la ville et son territoire.   

La compréhension que nous pouvons avoir de la ville est continuellement remise en jeu : documenter, représenter et projeter cette complexité apparaissent comme des actions essentielles à une connaissance approfondie de la production spatiale urbaine, depuis les enjeux de proximité aux enjeux territoriaux, pour constamment redonner sens à la ville.

Urban inventories relate to both the act of making an inventory and the act of inventing. The conference-exhibition Urban Inventories seeks to investigate these two aspects of the inventory along with the prospective potential of urban documentation. The conference and exhibition investigate the documentation and the representation of the city (infrastructure, built environment, public space, formal and informal housing or settlements, etc.) as well as urban phenomena (densification, disparities, economy, ecology, etc.) as a design-research project. These investigations call on researchers within design and related disciplines interested in issues and situations linked to the development of the city, to its uses and its representation in all forms (drawing, photography, video, cartography, etc.). We are interested in the crossover between various forms of design-research projects relating to these issues and from various geographical contexts, critical forms of documentation and of representation, and by a discussion on the interplay of design and research. The context of the conference is thus defined by three areas: (1) urban complexity, (2) representational forms of knowledge and (3) research as design. In light of contemporary urban processes, of growing global urbanisation and the complexity this entails in terms of social, economic, political, ecological, technological or spatial concerns, an interdisciplinary and plural investigation becomes necessary and pressing. The understanding that we may have of the city is constantly challenged: to document, to represent and to project this complexity appear as essential tasks toward a deeper understanding of urban spatial production at all scales, from the proximate to the territorial, in order to generate new meaning for the city.

Call for Proposals

Contributors to the conference-exhibition will present their work while considering urban complexities, representational forms of knowledge and research as a design project. Four central preoccupations are to be explored: situated practice, representation, projection (or the practice of design) and investigation. Situated practice places the researcher-designer in direct dialogue with the context inventoried to better integrate knowledge within action and eventually demonstrate the multidimensionality of the city and its processes. From situated practice come questions of representation and visualization that allow a better understanding of the complex phenomena studied. These questions are closely related to design and we are particularly interested in exploratory representational practices, be it cartography, architectural drawing or model, photography, multimedia or other hybrid forms that can serve the project and the investigation. Representation is then thought of not as an explicative practice, but as a process able to transform the observed and inventoried phenomena. This position proposes that representation becomes itself a project and that, consequently, the exploratory, documentary and situated practice linked to representation manifests itself as a practice of design. Here, the principle of investigation that pertains to research is crucial: representation is interrogative and exploratory rather than explicatory. In this sense, the research-as-design projects presented, discussed and exhibited raise open-ended questions on the city; they are investigative processes as opposed to design proposals.

Proposed contributions should therefore be engaged with these concerns and demonstrate, through the production of artefacts, how the making of an inventory can lead to invention. Each contributor is invited to present the subject of the inventory, the methods deployed for both the documentation and the invention, and, finally, the questions, knowledge or speculations brought up by the invention.

This call for contribution will be completed in a single round and will be evaluated by a scientific committee. Each contributor will present his or her work in a visual communication of 20 minutes and will exhibit a specimen of the work in the collective exhibition.