THIS SESSION IS TRANSFERRED TO LISBON !

THE SESSION NUMBER REMAINS 38.

THIS SESSION IS TRANSFERRED TO LISBON !

THE SESSION NUMBER REMAINS 35.

SESSION 31 

Ambiance and Artificial Intelligence.   

Artificial Intelligence has recently become ingrained in our everyday lives, sparking discussions and invigorating our casual conversations. Since the emergence of ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Dall-E in November 2022, the global professional futur appears vastly transformed. The notion of AI potentially replacing intellectual and creative professions, particularly in architecture, has surfaced.

However, AI isn't new, boasting nearly 70 years of evolution. What's evolving is its universal nature, transitioning from highly specialized fields like medicine to broader accessibility. AI now concerns each individual, offering the chance to specialize (or at least believe so) in areas where expertise was once limited or absent.

In architecture, the flame had been kindling for years with the introduction of algorithmic tools like Grasshopper and Dynamo, paving the way for generative design. This approach allows exploring numerous solutions to intricate problems and evaluating them based on their performance. AI speeds up this process. While past digital technology primarily focused on productivity enhancements, such as simplifying professional exchanges or aiding plan corrections, AI now nurtures creativity by significantly expanding the exploration scope during design phases.

Yet, the profession isn't under threat. On the contrary, AI usage reveals the need for more knowledge, skills, and experience to produce high-quality outcomes. Furthermore, beyond swiftly generating sketches and renderings, AI simplifies environmental studies, promoting better alignment with ecological imperatives in projects. To capitalize on these advancements, it's crucial to comprehend the offerings of various AI applications: how they function, their cost, accessibility, the learning curve, and their actual effectiveness. Understanding technical advancements is equally vital, discerning whether it signifies a radical shift or continuity. Observing the practices of other industry participants is also instructive for adapting or responding appropriately.

This session will explore and showcase cutting-edge AI tools and techniques in architectural and urban projects, specifically focusing on ambiances. On one side, there are capabilities for rapidly simulating thermal, aerodynamic, acoustic, and solar studies. On the other, the creation of images involves reference systems (phenomenological) encompassing ambiances from shared heritage or personalized approaches.

These applications encourage us to delve deeply into the theme of ambiances, whether through a sensory or instrumentalized approach..

Session Chair : Laurent Lescop.

SESSION 32 

Ambiance et propagations. 

A produção de lugares urbanos que potenciem a criação de ambiências singulares, que reforcem a ligação das pessoas ao ambiente – físico, natural, construído e social – através da apropriação e do proporcionar atmosferas cognitivas, sensitivas, sensoriais e socioculturais geradoras de memórias, bem-estar e conforto é um desafio emergente. Nomeadamente, se o associarmos às necessidades societais contemporâneas de contextos urbanos mais sustentáveis e resilientes. Ambos aspetos se apresentam como desafios a que urge encontrar respostas que sejam mais ágeis, flexíveis e adaptadas aos contextos socio-espaciais. Esta sessão objetiva proporcionar o debate sobre estes desafios a partir da temática dos rios urbanos, principalmente no que se refere à sua (re)naturalização, contextualização socioespacial e o envolvimento e a participação das comunidades ribeirinhas. Indaga-se sobre as perspetivas de construção de conhecimento científico e social, do uso e apropriação de paisagens fluviais, e respetiva recuperação e criação de novas memórias; às perspetivas de cocriação de abordagens para a reabilitação dos rios em contextos urbanos, transformando-os em lugares.

Session Chair : Pascal Amphoux.

SESSION 33 

Ambiances and Displacement.   

O objetivo desta sessão é colocar em foco a(s) ideia(s) de deslocamento a partir da noção das ambiências, bem como fomentar discussões que  possam trazer à superfície os dilemas contemporâneos das cidades. No cenário contemporâneo algumas questões  pautam o debate sobre o futuro das cidades e do mundo na relação com seus habitantes. Dentre elas, as crises humanitárias e migratórias, a crise climática, assim como as questões de preservação de patrimônios e desenvolvimento sustentável. Essas questões têm em comum uma relação, não só, com a ideia clássica do deslocamento - aquela que corresponde ao nomadismo, a mobilidade, ao movimento espaço-temporal, como também se relacionam com a ideia do que Augê (2010) chama de “mobilidade sobremoderna” - que corresponde ao “paradoxo de um mundo onde podemos teoricamente fazer tudo sem deslocarmo-nos e onde, no entanto, deslocamo-nos.”(p.16) Ou seja, estamos falando de deslocamentos espaciais, temporais, socio-culturais, históricos, etc.

Entendemos que para desenvolver uma capacidade de lidar com as complexidades e dilemas do mundo e das cidades contemporâneas é fundamental que olhemos nas entrelinhas. É preciso acompanhar os processos, os deslocamentos, e entender como se dá a relação indivíduo-espaço.Nessa perspectiva, o estudo das ambiências, a abrangência dos estudos sobre os deslocamentos , o entendimento das subjetividades dos diversos grupos socioculturais que habitam as cidades contemporâneas e seus espaços cotidianos, são capazes de transformar de forma radical o(s) projeto(s) de cidade que ambicionamos para o futuro, cidades mais abertas (Sennet,2018), democráticas e inclusivas. Pensar, explorar e estudar as ambiências no mundo contemporâneo que habitamos e que estão permanentemente em mudanças, significa olhar, sentir, habitar em um microssegundo de tempo em determinado espaço. Como contingência efêmera dos espaços, as ambiências se nutrem e se relacionam do/com o concreto, do/com o sensível, do/com os aspectos sociais e culturais do espaço, se moldando a partir da riqueza e da multiplicidade dos encontros. Nesse sentido, as ambiências estão em movimento, assim como podem representar deslocamentos, podem ressignificar existências ou mesmo reorganizar simbolismos.  

A exemplo disso, podemos falar sobre como os aspectos socio-culturais e sensíveis compõe uma ambiência que pode reconstruir vínculos espaciais no caso de espaços da diáspora. Ou como esses mesmos aspectos podem ressignificar um lugar histórico de importância patrimonial. Ou ainda como elementos concretos e sensíveis podem se unir na configuração de uma ambiência reconciliadora de ambientes degradados, ou segregados.

Sob tal ponto, compreendemos o território inerente e imprescindível no que abrange os estudos de deslocamento, tendo em vista as familiaridades carregadas do sujeito para com o espaço atravessado e as subjetividades construídas em trânsito. Deste modo, o deslocamento se apresenta enquanto um fenômeno transitório, capaz de criar novas ambiências e territorializaçãoes na relação indivíduo-meio. Sob o contexto de transitoriedade, a transformação das ambiências em que ocorrem os deslocamentos nos trazem alguns questionamentos em torno da relação dialógica entre o indivíduo e arquitetura/espaço. Quem são os atores que compõem essa ambiência? Quais as dinâmicas de interação que proporcionam uma atmosfera única ao contexto investigado? Propomos nesta sessão, portanto, explorar os diversos deslocamentos – temporais, espaciais, socio-culturais – pelos quais podem atravessar as ambiências e como eles contribuem para a (re)afirmação de patrimônios históricos e ambientais, ou, de outra forma, para a negociação de pertencimentos e identidades de grupos segregados e deslocados nas cidades e no mundo.

Session Chair : Ilana Sancovschi, Fernando Mathias and Cristiane Rose Duarte .

SESSION 34 

Ambiances and social identity.  

A identidade social refere-se ao reconhecimento de si-mesmo mesmo como um ente atrelado a uma ideia de grupo e ao pertencimento a um lugar, envolvendo uma série de significados afetivos, dóxicos e emocionais. Esses significados são moldados a partir da alteridade e são ajustados no confronto entre similaridades e diferenças.

O processo de construção identitária é dinâmico e ininterrupto. Duarte, Miranda, Pinheiro e Silva (2022): lembram que o ser humano está sempre buscando a explicação para a sua existência e seu pertencimento ao mundo em que vive que, por sua vez, está em perpétua mutação.

Frente a isso, entende-se que o papel do lugar como suporte espacial para o processo de construção identitária é essencial. Assim como a memória, a identidade está ancorada em algum espaço que confere materialidade e permite a identificação do sujeito. Para Proshansky a identidade de lugar (place identity) é uma subestrutura da auto-identidade do indivíduo construído ao longo de sua vivência no espaço físico. Graumann (1983), por sua vez, assevera que a identificação com os lugares é “um antecedente do auto-conceito do sujeito que é a sua construção continuada da sua auto-identidade” (p.137).  

Esses processos de identificação com o lugar pressupõem a existência de sentimentos de pertencimento ao lugar.  Em diversas camadas, desde a escala individual (casa) até a nacional (nação, país), passando por diversas gradações grupais, há sempre relações de reconhecimento, pertinência e ancoragem ao território, ao meio, ao lugar. Trata-se, portanto, de um constructo subjetivo que articula a dimensão cognitiva com a percepção social, o comportamento e o juízo de valor, que, por sua vez, tem base cultural.  

É possível dizer que os processos de construção identitária na escala urbana se ancora nos lugares por meio das ambiências. De fato, os aspectos sensíveis do espaço urbano incrementam sentidos de pertencimento e apropriação do suporte espacial, ligando-o a uma estrutura de reconhecimento e identificação.  Os sentidos, por envolverem o corpo, permitem a construção de significados que traduzem características, sentimentos e afetos adotados por indivíduos e grupos como representações de si mesmos.

Esta sessão temática se abre à reflexão dos processos de construção identitária que têm nas ambiências seus agentes de elaboração de narrativas e de ancoragem para as histórias individuais e coletivas nas cidades.  

Desde as torcidas de futebol até as reivindicações territoriais que buscam nas características do espaço vivido a aderência necessária para conformar o grupo, passando por raves suburbanas e grupos de agremiações carnavalescas, espera-se confrontar casos em que a ambiência esteja na base das experiências coletivas que evocam a consciência de fazer parte de um sistema de relações sociais, de interações cotidianas entre pessoas que compartilham um mesmo universo simbólico..

Session Chair : Cristiane Rose Duarte and Ethel Pinheiro.

SESSION 35 

Ambient resonance and eco-construction.  

Today, it is no longer an option for urban and built environment professionals to ignore global warming and its consequences for our living conditions. The need to comply with standards and other labels that govern architectural and urban production is legitimate. However, these regulations, which advocate reducing the exchange with the outside world and maintaining the interior at a comfortable average temperature through air conditioning, are mostly based on sophisticated engineering that, paradoxically, consumes a lot of energy and exacerbates the urban heat island effect. What's more, this approach, based on the idea of an universal human being, proposes a deterministic and prescriptive vision of comfort, resulting in a smoothing of the environment that is indifferent to the specificities and rhythms of different uses (Pascal Amphoux).

This attitude is based on the dominant paradigms of modern Western thought, which presuppose a subject who has set himself apart from the world with the aim of knowing it, conquering it and dominating it in order to optimize the material conditions necessary for his well-being and fulfilment. In other words, modern man sees the world as so many points of aggression whose resistance must be broken down, subdued and shaped according to his desires and aspirations (Hartmut Rosa). But this attitude of domination proves its difficulty tosustain. By adopting the dominant viewpoint of the natural sciences, man has exploited the planet's resources without taking care of them. The result is that we all now face "an universal shortage of shared space and habitable land". The globe is no longer big enough to accommodate humanity and its plans for universal modernity (Bruno Latour).

The alternative is to consider another vision, that of a human being who immediately enters into a state of complete resonance with the world (Peter Sloterdijk, Bruce Bégout). This tonal understanding of the qualities of the atmosphere, which does not require an attitude of searching for causes or aiming at goals, merges into an immediate understanding of what surrounds us. This alternative opens up perspectives on the possibilities of inhabiting the world in the sense of caring for it (Martin Heidegger).

So it's not a question of creating spaces cut off from the outside world, which would destroy our emotional capacity for resonance, our sense of atmosphere, but of creating more or less intense filters to build intimate spheres that can be inhabited, always in co-presence with the other inhabitants, whether human or non-human. This co-presence, combined with a shared sense of a common breath of life, imposes logics of attention to others.

Under these conditions, to what extent is it possible to resolve the contradictory issues of the deterministic imperatives of thermal comfort and those of the possibilities of emotional resonance with the world? 

How can we respond to the demand to reduce the exchange between inside and outside without compromising our ability to live in a way that is attentive to the world and vibrate along with the atmosphere?

Bibliography

Pascal Amphoux, Vers une théorie des trois conforts. Annuaire 90, Département d’architecture de l’EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), 1990, pp. 27-30. <hal-01561140>

Bruce Bégout, Le concept d’ambiance, Le Seuil, 2020 

Martin Heidegger, « Bâtir habiter penser » in Essais et conférences, Gallimard (traduction de Vorträge and Aufsatze, Pfullingen, 1954 par PREAU André)

Hartmut Rosa, Rendre le monde indisponible, La Découverte, 2020

Peter Sloterdijk, Ecumes. Sphères III, Paris, Libella Maren Sell, 2005

Session Chair : Alia Sellami Benayed and Imen Landoulsi.

SESSION 36 

Beyond the predictable: exploring ambiances in everyday life in cities.  

With the end of the period of greatest confinement of the Pandemic, it became more evident that there are some differences between the world imagined behind the screens of cell phones, tablets or through simple daydreams of our imagination and the collective experience in the here-and-now of cities. If we understand that atmospheres are contained in environments in addition to all their material and immaterial, sensorial and kinesthetic attributes, we also see another characteristic of the urban environment: the ability to surprise us. The surprise of passing through a square and smelling a perfume announcing spring; the disturbance when walking along the seacoast and being “chased” by music that does not correspond to our musical taste; a rain that falls suddenly, or an unexpected windstorm in the middle of the afternoon are examples of the unexpected in the experience of environments in the city. Knijnik (2009) presents another example on this issue and reminds us that, when we come across another walker on the same sidewalk, coming in the opposite direction to us, a moment of silent negotiation arises where, in the next step, the bodies express otherness. The encounter with the Other, the need to negotiate conflicts are part of “in-person” urban practices; These are eventualities that were not programmed by our imagination while we dreamed of the world outside of isolation. Thus, no matter how much we try to imagine a virtual simulation, the experience of urban space will always be subject to the confrontation of our own will with that which is external to us. Otherness cannot be simulated without the real presence of the Other. In this context, more than ever, we understand that ambiances demonstrate a pulse, a temporality that can range from pause to the dizzying speed of its elements. We find in them the potential to create territories, domains or to be excluded and uprooted from that place we believed to be ours. When moving around the city, we are taking risks, experiencing the place, living in a constant action of agreement with the world and transforming ourselves. Working in urban environments, and being affected by them, establishes - through the unexpected - who we will be at the end of each journey. 

This thematic session will then seek to encourage a dialogue between the different possibilities of confrontations illustrated by reports, and to analyze the establishment of sensitive environments, the potential and intensity of each moment of recognition of Otherness in the immersion of urban life. The aim is to discuss the extent to which when giving new meaning to the place experienced, or recalling it, individuals evoke the affective tones that qualify that moment of experience, truly building "blocks of meanings".

Session Chair :  Ethel Pinheiro, Cristiane Rose Duarte and Paula Uglione.

SESSION 37 

City, Forest – Atmospherics of cultural and environmental activism.  

The session proposed here seeks to foster dialogue on ambiances and the role of creative practices in the cultural politics of environmental activism. It will examine the potential for creative practice to play a role in instituting sustainable cultures and environments within which the atmospheres that support life are at once an aesthetic, affective an ecological concern. This session seeks collaboration with Brazilian cultural activists, but also aims to bring together audiences, with researchers and artists working at the frontiers of social and climate injustice. Together we will explore what the role and influence of urban and rural environments is on cultural practice, how environmental aesthetics intersect with the material and social challenges creatives are facing and how, in turn, these ambiances shape artistic and cultural practice. Together we will ask how both rural and urban environments are changing/adapting in response to contemporary struggles such as urban violence and climate action, the ambiances generated and encountered accordingly, and the influence of this on creative practice in the areas. In this it seeks to build on the example offered by People's Palace Projects (PPP), an arts and research centre based at Queen Mary, University of London, and their sister organisation PPPdoBrasil. Over the last twenty five years, they have brought together artists, activists, academics and audiences to challenge social and climate injustices through the power of the arts. From working with filmmakers in the Xingu to poets in Complexo da Maré, one thing that unites these diverse research initiatives is the relationship between environment(s), cultural practice and activism..

Session Chair : Martin Wellton and Poppy Spowage.

SESSION 38 

Climatic backgrounds and climatic textures of ambiances.   

This session welcomes research contributions that engage with the contemporary debate on how climatic conditions contribute to the city dwellers experience either as backgrounds or as textures of urban ambiances. The session is open to proposals examining the climatic dimensions of urban ambiances through manifold approaches (theoretical, methodological, case studies...). Interdisciplinary proposals are especially welcomed.

Climatic backgrounds of urban ambiances — Even in today’s predominantly urban contemporary societies, meteorological hazards in space and time continue to influence human activities, making them possible, impossible or risky. These hazards determine the possibility of co-presence situations in public spaces and the nature of the interactions within them, especially in relation to seasonal rhythms. Consequently, they constitute a fundamental aspect of the emergence of urban ambiances. Meteorological hazards also affect our perception of the world by shaping ambiances through specific configurations of light, heat, humidity or wind. Ambiances appear in climatic contexts that simultaneously determine their existence and boundaries while shaping their characteristics and modalities. Ambiances are fundamentally imbued with the climatic conditions of the places in which they emerge.

Climatic textures of urban ambiances — Contemporary built environments can be viewed as vast assemblages of what we call ‘pico-climates’, some of which form distinct climatic envelopes, identifiable bubbles with stable characteristics, while others are more intermittent, nebulous or random. These clusters of pico-climates define specific urban climatic landscapes, forming both singular and recurrent climatic events. As we move through these pico-climatic landscapes, we encounter ruptures and permeabilities. We experience one pico-climate after another without fully comprehending them, only becoming aware of them when a pico-climatic event imposes itself: the saving draught at the bend of a heat-stricken street, the spring sunbeam at a certain time on a certain bench in a certain square, and so on. The ways in which they appear, depending on the urban context or temporary weather conditions, modify our experience of the city. Pico-climates give a climatic texture to urban ambiances. As potential sources of restoration, pleasure and surprise in ordinary urban activities, they are powerful emotional forces in cities and contribute to place attachment.

Session Chair : Daniel Siret and Ignacio Requena.

SESSION 39 

Creative ambiances in public spaces.  

In 2020/2021, the COVID19 pandemic suddenly interrupted the dynamics of city routines and emptied urban spaces, which affected everyone, both in terms of physical and/or mental health, as well as relationships with other people and with the environment. The following post-pandemic period has marked a change, fostering new possibilities for the population to occupy urban areas, especially open spaces. In this context, this session is linked to movements for the retaking of urban spaces and their humanization (GEHL, 2015), understanding the need and the importance of offering “conditions for people to think, plan and act with imagination (...), giving visibility to creative resources, invisible in their physical environment, and the way the city is experienced” (LANDRY, 2012, p. 11). To do this, participants must be oriented towards ‘creative ambiances’ emerging in open urban spaces – defined here as ambiances in which people feel creative, i.e., environments that stimulate individual or collective creativity. The objective of the session is to understand what has been happening in these spaces and how these initiatives change the way people and groups understand the city and establish affective links with it. More than identifying and characterizing situations of appropriation of free urban spaces, we hope the papers will examine the meaning behind these uses and their relationship with the emergence and consolidation of creative ambiances. Therefore, the aim is to debate social movements of different natures (whether they take place in continuity with pre-pandemic actions or emerge as completely new initiatives) and in different regions, prioritizing the diversity of situations and points of view. Exploring this theme will allow the emergence of a broad panorama on the subject, being especially useful for: (i) understanding the concept of creative ambiance and its emergence/consolidation; (ii) understanding the role of the socio-physical environment for healthy living; (iii) proposing interventions that can help create appropriate and stimulating environments for different populations.

Session Chair : Gleice Azambuja Elali.

SESSION 40 

Existential corpography. 

[THIS SESSION WILL ALSO TAKE PLACE IN LISBON]    

How can we rethink the relationship between human beings and space? How can we question the mutations of the sensitive environment through our daily practices? What dimension of atmospheric affectivity is produced when we interact in/with space? And how do ambiances affect us? These are questions that raise the issue of the sensitive dimension of existence in order to explore the aesthetic experience of various forms of life in contemporary cities. Following Jean-Paul Thibaud's theoretical suggestion, we are interested in debating with researchers who are interested in reflecting on urban spaces from the "vital and emotional power of everyday environments" in order to understand the diverse and multiple tonalities of the streets. Tons that are also expressions of a "poetics of space" (P. Sansot) in which bodies immerse themselves, producing a sensitive experience and, therefore, we need to observe how spaces are perceived and how individuals characterise them atmospherically through experimental practices. Our proposal is therefore to "think with" (De certeau), in the intermediate place (Lisbon-Rio), the bodily aesthetic experience (G. Böhme) as an actor of places, landscapes and routes through actions such as walks, flânerie, musical itineraries, artivism, walking, etc.

hus, our proposal is to think-with, in the in-between place (Lisbon-Rio), the aesthetic bodily experience (G. Böhme) as an actor in places, landscapes and itineraries through actions such as walks, flânerie, musical itineraries, artivism, walking, etc. Actions to be interpreted as signs of a poetic reconfiguration of urban tonalities in a production of "temporary affective zones" that constitute existential cartographies, putting the power of corporeality back at the center in synergy with urban sensoriality. Temporary affective zones need to be thought of as an expression of atmospheric and tonal qualities that will be a manifestation of a feeling, an emotion that emanates from the lived space and a resonance of the perceived space in which the ephemeral experience is consumed. We invite researchers to present interdisciplinary proposals for this session in the form of theoretical contributions, methods, case studies, in order to activate a moment of exchange and suggestion of ideas for thinking about environments from the point of view of emotional and affective cartographies derived from bodily and experiential practices.

Session Chair : Fabio La Rocca and Cíntia Sanmartin Fernandes .

SESSION 41 

Experimentations, drifts and deambulatory poetics.  

The poetic apprehension of walking experiences brings the walker a recognition of himself, of the Other and the world. Artistic experimentations from the 19th century brought the value of walking to an aesthetic level and both surrealism and dadaism were influenced by the flânerie of Charles Baulelaire, who in turn had in Walter Benjamin one of the greatest translators of his drive for wandering through/in the city. The situationists, in the 20th century, brought this game of meanings into the practice of drift, demonstrating that an entire city could be ressignified by an everyday, non-spectacular and technically urban action. In this process of (re)knowing the world, the body becomes a moving machine, charged with its constitutive, sensitive and, therefore, subjective historicity, which traces a trajectory over the duration of a time-space. Based on these premises, this thematic session seeks to stimulate the discussion and recognition of urban space through aesthetic experiences, as part of the corporal, critical and analytical experience of cities, based on the works of wandering/drift by Francesco Careri, the situationists deambulations and the answers obtained by the intersection between anthropology, sociology and Architecture, in order to provoke the apprehension of urban affections. In this sense, the idea of drift is understood by the movement as a technique for passing through environments of the city(s) that make up a practical unfolding of this psychogeographical apprehension. We welcome works that explore the affective dimension of urban space through the aesthetic recognition of walking or the experience of passages; artistic essays or propositions, stimulated by movement, in the urban environment; cartographic studies; mental mappings; situated analysis of paths and any approach that brings out the subjectivities of local experience in urban context..

Session Chair : Rodrigo Kamimura, Ethel Pinheiro and Fernanda Silva Freitas.

SESSION 42 

Metabolic Atmospheres.  

This panel will explore interactions between atmospheric aesthetics and metabolism. How do human and nonhuman bodies—and their interrelations—register the metabolic influences of atmospheric properties like smell, temperature, and humidity? How do bodily and technological emanations contribute to these atmospheric properties? How have artists, writers, activists, and other researchers been addressing these metabolic influences in ways that challenge and move beyond racist and colonial notions of climatic determinism (e.g., the idea that climate's metabolic effects account for biological and "temperamental" differences between races)?

Bringing recent conversations about atmospheric aesthetics (e.g., Derek McCormack, Peter Adey, Peter Sloterdijk) into conversation with work in New Materialism (e.g., Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Mel Chen) and sensory studies (e.g., Desiree Foerster, David Howes, Hi'ilei Hobart), papers should explore the nuances of "air conditioning" (Sloterdijk) in urban spaces and/or in other spaces and scales affected by urban processes. Possible topics include immersive & multimodal art installations; literary engagements with atmospheric influence; environmental media; smellscape; architectural ambiance; atmospheres of securitization, militarization, and policing; queer atmospheres; the multiplicity of fragmented, urban atmospheres; and subaltern projects of atmospheric worldmaking..

Session Chair : Hsuan L. Hsu.

SESSION 43 

Insurgent Urban Narratives in/from the Post-Pandemic World.  

The Covid19 pandemic triggered a series of psychosocial (disturbances) in cities, especially affecting marginalised groups in an asymmetrical way. Understanding urban narratives (affective, environmental, relational) in the post-pandemic context involves a complex analysis of individual and collective experiences, as well as transformations in the subjects' imaginations and memories. The emergence of non-democratic policies, which unfold into new ethics, aesthetics and poetics for relational spaces, have altered power relations and contributed to moving urban imaginaries away from retrograde conceptions of the world. This phenomenon has influenced the displacement of urban imaginaries, moving them away from conceptions of the world considered retrograde, promoting adjustments (realignments) in collective perceptions of the urban environment, challenging preconceived ideas about the world of life and driving a reassessment of the traditional narratives associated with life in cities. The impacts of these changes can be seen not only in the social dynamics of the post-pandemic world, but also in the physical and symbolic configurations of urban spaces, reflecting a continuous evolution in the interactions between society, politics and the urban environment. Understanding these post-pandemic urban narratives can provide insights into the crises triggered by ongoing social, cultural and economic transformations. Furthermore, observing how these narratives challenge established paradigms will help to inform future approaches to public space planning. To guide the debate, this session aims to present and develop some reflections on the following questions: What forms and expressions of urban narratives have emerged from individual and collective experiences in the (post) pandemic world? How have these narratives contributed to shifting subjects' imaginaries and memories towards zones of unstable experience, situated on the borders of common sense? What experiences, silenced or excluded during the pandemic, would be necessary to speculate about a new generation of radicalism in urban narratives?

We therefore invite contributions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

-Reconfiguration of urban space: The pandemic has led to a reassessment of urban space, with an increase in remote working influencing the dynamics of urban centres. Narratives of decentralisation and the search for more open environments and green spaces have gained prominence.

-Ecological awareness: The health crisis has raised awareness of the importance of sustainable and healthy environments. Narratives emphasising sustainability, urban resilience and connection with nature are emerging.

-Community and solidarity: Narratives highlighting the importance of community and solidarity are growing. Neighbourhood experiences, local support networks and valuing interpersonal relationships are key.

-Digital transformations and connectivity: The acceleration of digital transformations during the pandemic has generated narratives about global connectivity and the ways in which technology influences our urban experiences, from remote working to online education.

-Reflections on fragility: The pandemic has led people to reflect on the fragility of human existence and the impermanence of social structures. This may have led to more fluid narratives and a renewed appreciation of the diversity of urban experiences.

-Hybridity and flexibility: The emergence of narratives that explore hybrid and flexible models, both in terms of work and in terms of lifestyles. This includes the idea of urban environments that adapt to different needs and circumstances.

Session Chair : Wagner de Souza Rezende.

SESSION 44 

Spacing out in the city - urban imaginaries and ambiances.  

In 'Project and Destiny', Argan (2000) asks himself: "Where does the desire for spacing out that springs from the human spirit come from?". Without finding an answer in the theoretical repertoire of architecture, which serves as his reflective basis, he adds: "whatever the initial impulse [in which ‘spacing out’ emerges], there is no doubt that through this process man recognizes and defines a relationship between himself and the world, delimiting a zone of experience". In this sense, parodying what Michel de Certeau (1994) wrote - "to walk is to lack a place" - we argue that "‘spacing out’ is to lack". It is in this context of pursuit that our steps weave and shape the inhabited space. We build human space, we ‘space out’, because we radically lack something. We ‘space out’ driven by an inescapable impulse (‘drive’ in Freud, 1914/15) in search of ourselves and our relationship with the world. In brief: ‘spacing out’, architecting is a different and much deeper issue than building (tecktonics). It's having an absolute, definitive lack of place in the world, it's walking around in search of oneself, yet collectively. 

In an intimate relationship with the city, this argument allows us to reflect on this sentient subject - who is predisposed to the sensible, as Böhme (2017) writes - and at the same time desirous. To this end, the discussion on 'spacing out in the city' highlights urban imaginaries and ambiances as forms of mediation between man and his spatiality (BERQUE, 1998). We are talking about an emotional imaginary, which is revealed and manifested in resonance with spaces, in the set of pictorial representations, mentally elaborated and intensely charged with affectivity (WUNENBURGER, 2007). It therefore corresponds to each culture's own way of establishing an alliance between its sensibility (subjective drives and emotions) and the environment (physical, historical and social). ambiances, in turn, highlight the importance of affective emotional experience (in the sense of what affects us), the incorporation of the faculty of the sensitive (BÖHME, 2017), as well as the possibility of ‘spacing out’ through affect.

'Spacing out in the city' thus takes urban imaginaries and ambiances as key elements of a question, still little investigated in architecture and urbanism, about the forms of perception, mediation and elaboration of space, in a way linked to emotional experiences, with an aesthetic depth and a symbolic richness of its own. Therefore, are welcome for this session essayistic proposals, theoretical reflections and reports on experimental practices in the field - such as cartographic processes, image production, ethnographic approach studies -, since they are ways of exploring methodologies capable of activating sensitive experiences in relation to a common, lived and experienced territory. 

Session Chair : Julieta M. Vasconcelos Leite.

SESSION 45 

Spatialities of participation: other systems of sensibility between art and architecture.   

The prism of 'spatialities of participation' proposes a gaze on different discourses and practices situated between the fields of art and architecture, that are pushing their boundaries and, in the terms of Jacques Rancière (1995), inaugurating other regimes of sensible experience. From this perspective, there is an interest in questioning the political and aesthetic aspects of what Claire Bishop (2004) once called the "social turn" in art and other fields of knowledge, including architecture.

Indeed, we know how, in the turbulent years of the 1960-70s, 'participation' emerged as a watchword in various horizons of aesthetic and political transformation. On the one hand, this umbrella term encompassed a broader process of questioning the art production conventions, as well as the disciplinary limits of architecture. The well-known intersection between these fields - consecrated by the ideas of the "expanded field" of art (KRAUSS, 1979) and architecture (VIDLER, 2005) - finds a particular expression: the common impulse to overcome the status of the author and the work, accompanied by the desire for new relations with the public and its context. What Umberto Eco (1962) identified in the same period as the contemporary invention of the "open work" not only pointed to aesthetic interest in social processes of all kinds but also presupposed, in this decentering of the object, the political repositioning of the author and the observer. In such a way, the emphasis on the public (or user) ultimately represented the possibility of including them in the processes of production and appropriation of the built environment - a place of transformative social experience.

However, after about five decades, 'participation' appears as a sign of real social control devices. Terms like 'interaction,' 'collaboration,' 'creativity,' and 'engagement,' which constituted the contesting lexicon of that 'critical emergence' of participation, today blend with the flexible, self-fulfilling, and precarious forms of the current logic of productive organization and economic management of life. In our current horizon, we see, among other examples, how urban policies of social participation function as instruments for legitimizing decisions made a priori by public and private agents (MIESSEN, 2011); how the recent emergence of collaborative workspaces is channeling new precarious work relationships (BOLTANSKI et CHIAPELLO, 2008); or how creativity and experience have become new cultural circuits for achieving record audiences, involving them in unique experiences and, whenever possible, capable of activating creative skills (BISHOP, 2012).

This does not mean that 'participation' has been exhausted. However, recognizing its counterface seems essential if we still intend to unveil other horizons of political transformation. In this sense, relying on the concepts of 'politics' and 'police,' as proposed by Rancière (1995; 1996), we are interested in seeing in participatory spatial practices the possibilities to produce the 'dissent'. In broad terms, if art and architecture contain a 'political' dimension when they can destabilize a "common sensible experience" with another, we must inquire whether, despite their declared aspirations, their participation experiences are indeed capable of destabilizing defined positions on objects, subjects, and processes; as well as the possible relations between them and systems of legibility, belonging, and exclusion.

Session Chair : Rafael Goffinet de Almeida, Tatiana Francischini Brandão dos Reis and Rodrigo Nogueira Lima

SESSION 46 

Sympathy, vulnerability, and ambiance creation.  

The current environmental and health crises are forcing architects and urban planners to radically rethink how they design and practice living places. New ecological reflections are appearing where man is no longer the unique center of interest in front of all other issues. Reflections around atmospheres are all the more significant because they allow us to go outside the domain of purpose and utility and thus encourage creators to rethink their aesthetics within the wider sphere of felt relations. If “the atmosphere is not what we perceive, but by which we perceive, and the mean by which it opens the perceptibility of the world” (Thibaud), exploring the sympathy of things and living beings then unlocks new perspectives of research around our environment. 

Sympathy, in the literal sense of the term, therefore, designates this hypersensitivity to the sensitive flows which irrigate our daily lives, and which therefore involve us in forms of vulnerability. 

Many recent works in positive psychology have been sneakily influencing the productions of designers to create for the positive and happy situations by erasing the negative and vulnerable ones. However, it is by creating places that inspire emotional freedom that we can feel the dynamic correspondences with our environment and not just an empathetic identification. 

The medium in which this happens is the atmosphere, affective and environmental, where we are immersed and by which we can see, hear, touch, smell, move. If atmosphere arises from the coming together of people and things (Ingold) we must then, as creators and inhabitants, open ourselves to explore

 the sympathy between the affect and the environment.  In this constantly renewed context, the tools, methods, and theoretical principles of the creative procedures must also evolve towards these new challenges of hypersensitivity stimulation.

This session is open to researchers, architects, designers, and artists working on the creation of ambiance, sympathy, empathy, vulnerability, affect whether in research, pedagogy or architectural design or creative activities.

The session “Sympathy, vulnerability and ambient design” extends the reflections of a Creative Europe EACEA-32-2019 program which ends in December 2023.

Session Chair : Evangelia Paxinou and Nicolas Remy.

SESSION 47 

The infinite art of Radio.  

“Dear invisible ones” was how Walter Benjamin called the listeners of his radio shows when he worked for public radio in Berlin and Frankfurt in the 1920s. He loved the popular dimension of this new medium and its infinite possibilities as a space for creation, for practicing and learning criticism, and for storytelling and the staging of daily life. For Benjamin, radio was the perfect place for the practical application of his thoughts. Today, radio, beyond or below being a medium, is being widely revisited as an artistic form, and in terms of its practices and techniques.1 So, what does the use of radio hold for those who work on ambiance and atmospheres?

Radio creates atmospheres as much as it plays with them, and beyond the simple broadcast of a show, today all aspects of radio are subject to experimentation: the forms and places of recording as much as the forms and places of diffusion. The contributory dimension shakes up the idea of radio as a one-way transmitter and receiver. There are many artists (sound designers, playwrights, sound artists, visual artists, and theatre creators) who have begun to use radio as a material for creation and expression. And there are also many architects and urban planners who are now using radio and its audiences as a medium for public consultations and co-creation processes.

In the evolving landscape of radio, contemporary practices have ushered in a dynamic era of inhabitant engagement and grassroots storytelling. Podcasts have emerged as a powerful medium, enabling individuals to craft and share narratives that resonate with local communities. Moreover, a captivating trend involves inhabitants producing shows tailored for local events, such as parties, thereby infusing a unique and authentic flavor into the airwaves. The shift towards local recording and production both fosters a sense of community ownership for inhabitants and also sparks meaningful discussions around specific subjects.

This decentralized approach to radio empowers inhabitants and social groups to amplify their voices, thereby fostering a sense of connection and shared experience through the airwaves. This bears witness to radio’s transformative potential in catalyzing community activation and enhancing the fabric of local cultures.

Between presence and ubiquity, sound connects as much as it confuses. The Sound Worlds of the Radio are alternately memoirs and fictions. Radio’s content accompanies daily life as well as the most vulnerable situations, such as places of care, remote places, places at war, all living spaces disrupted by health, environmental and political crises.

How does radio, as a listener or as a broadcaster, help us to understand “how the world sounds”? Listening engages in both reality and imagination. It can anchor us in a specific place and time or transport us elsewhere, to another time. It can also make different places and times coexist, separate them, and even inhibit them. In our daily lives we pass through worlds of sound, often for better, sometimes for worse. How do radio practices account for these different “present times”? Can they tell us about the sound worlds that we will travel through tomorrow? How does going through sound in general and, for this session, specifically through radio change our understanding of the world, and can these transmissions themselves be actions on the world?

This session is open to researchers, architects, designers, and artists working with or on radio. Its aim is to help provide an overview of questions, forms and radio practices linked to the notions of atmospheres and ambiance, whether in research, teaching, or even creative projects.

* “The infinite art of radio” uses the title of a Creative Europe program EACEA-32-2019 ending in December 2023, and aims to extend the questions in a new context.

Session Chair : Evangelia Paxinou, Saska Rakef, Nicolas Rémy and Nicolas Tixier.

SESSION 48 

The role of time in the shaping of urban ambiances: exploring newly-built neighbourhoods.  

This session welcomes research contributions that question the role of time in the shaping of urban ambiances and perceptions. In particular, the session is open to proposals that examine the ambiances of newly-built neighbourhoods as an illustration of the strangeness of situations before time takes its toll on them. Case studies and theoretical contributions are especially welcomed.

The thickness of time is fundamentally rooted in research into ambiances through concepts such as genius loci, palimpsest ambiance or the heritagization of atmospheres. This session would like to take a fresh look at this question by questioning the ambiances of the very newly-built neighbourhoods. Appearing within contemporary cities or in their outskirts, newly-built environments often display a kind of strangeness due to their unique architectural and urban layouts, their new and unused materials, their too-young vegetation, as well as the lack of established neighbourhood communities. Understanding these particular ambiances, before the sedimentation of the many traces of human and non-human life, allows us to grasp the role of time (linear, cyclical, subjective) in the shaping of ambiances encountered in more ordinary neighbourhoods.

Do the conditions of newly-built neighbourhood create different ambiances and experiences? Can they provide keys to understanding the temporal and sensory dimensions of ambiances? Does and how the deficit in the accumulation of presences, of sensory traces that intermingle, sediment and touch us, inform us about the temporal dimension of ambiances? How do the ambiances of very newly-built neighbourhoods fit in with the abstract linear time of past, present and future, with time of nature's cycles, with the subjective time of experience (Bergson, 1932)? Conversely, is this experienced time able to reproduce the lack of temporal thicknesses of the urban ambiance through concrete experiments, for instance using the body in movement, such as walking, dancing or hodology (Brinckerhoff, 2016), or imaginary transpositions (Sansot, 1996)?

Through these issues, the session will explore the links between sensitive and temporal modes of ambiances.

Session Chair : Emeline Bailly, Ignacio Requena and Daniel Siret.

SESSION 49 

To speak of oneself is to speak of the world: auto-ethnography, memories and ambiances.   

Time and memory, autoethnography. We live storied lives. The figure of the narrator is increasingly scarce in contemporary life, little is heard, little is created as a place conducive to face-to-face meetings in which silence makes place for the expression of sensations and feelings. Empathy with others needs the place of encounter, the one in which one can remember, seeking, in the present, references for family anecdotes, as Céline Verguet says when concluding that “heritage characterization lies between the identification of the environment and the identification of oneself” (2015).

In a world lacking spirituality, emotion and poetry (BOCHNER, 2019), it is urgent to take hold of our life narratives to fill and give meaning to the places we inhabit. Assuming the role of the chronicler who, as Benjamin (1985) says, does not distinguish between small and big facts, the remembrance of which is capable of conferring value on materialities that have disappeared, but which remain stored in the repositories of memory.

This memory is produced from the intersection of narratives, which can materialize in audiovisual media, illustrating the art of living in the city, to which Cornelia Eckert refers (2009). The ethnography of duration envisions the treatment of narrated memory as knowledge of oneself and the world, with the ambiances being part of this memory shared by the narrators. In this context, environments establish subjective and cultural relationships with time and space in which the individual is located (DUARTE et al, 2022).

Memory is, therefore, constructed and stabilized, permanently, from the production of meanings, in the present, as reminds us Assmann (2011). As a characteristic of the individual, every memory “is irreproducible — it dies with the person. What is called collective memory is not a remembrance, but something stipulated: this is important, and this is the story of how it happened, with the photos that imprison the story in our mind” (SONTAG, 2003, p. 74).

This session aims to welcome written and/or audiovisual reports that deal with the relationships between the temporalities of individual memories and the intersections of narratives between subjects and their experiences with architectural environments. It aims to produce a dialogue between cultures and subjects that thematize life experiences anchored in the forms and images of architecture, whether surviving or disappearing. The role of narrative in remembering and recreating architecture is the means to develop a means of reactivating memories of architectural and urban ambiances for present and future generations.

Session Chair : Cybelle Salvador Miranda.

SESSION 50 

Urban ambiances and affection: methodological proposals.  

Given the continued interest in “the occurrence of the encounter between these two instances: a body shaped by the city and a city shaped by the body" (Barbosa; Martins, 2022: 16), in this session, we aim to explore the interdisciplinary articulations of urban studies and the notion of affect. In what ways cities, their public spaces, and the bodies of the people who inhabit, use, practice, and traverse them are transformed and mutually affected? Furthermore, how can this affectation be narrated and represented?

The critical debate in the expanded field of urban studies has been evolving around the notion of urban experience since the second half of the 20th century. Simultaneously with the broadening of this multidisciplinary theoretical field, the study of environments, territorialities, and urban spatialities has incorporated sensory and affective aspects into its range of methodological possibilities for analysis, paving the way for non-hegemonic methodological constructions. "Being affected," as clarified by Favre-Saada (2005), is a theoretical and methodological stance beyond participation and observation, involving experience, sensitivity, creativity, the body in relation to and with space, placing ideas, experiences, and practices in perspective for the interpretation of urban environments. This session urges researchers to present creative methodological tools linked to applied social sciences to explore, narrate, and represent urban environments.

BARBOSA, Eliana; MARTINS, Ramon. Afeto. In: JACQUES, Paola Berenstein et all (orgs). Laboratorio urbano: pequeno lexico teorico-metodologico. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2022.

FAVRET-SAADA, Jeanne. Ser Afetado. In: Caderno de Campo n.13: 155 - 161, 2005.

Session Chair : Eliana Rosa de Queiroz Barbosa.

SESSION 51 

Educational virtual environments, 

ambiance simulation and new forms of interactions in teaching and learning architecture, urbanism and landscaping.  

This session aims to provoke an articulated discussion on two of the questions raised in the event's call for papers: 1) What is the role of the body, senses and subjectivities in the creation of ambiances in a society increasingly dependent on the digital? 2) What are the new opportunities that are emerging in the face of new challenges? And this is especially true in terms of confronting or critically questioning virtual environments, especially in the educational environment, which have been increasingly frequent in recent times, not only in terms of didactic-pedagogical experiences (virtual classrooms and workshops), but also in terms of congresses, seminars and scientific meetings held mostly remotely, which seems to persist, although some in a hybrid way, in the post-pandemic period. It is intended to distinguish the concepts of “ambiance”, “virtual environment” (specific to the language of computer science and information technology) and “virtual learning environment” (VLE – typical of the so-called distance education - EaD) from the concept of “virtual educational environment”, such as (re)creations, (re)inventions or simulations of real classroom environments and/or academic meetings, aiming at their humanization, with the help of information and communication technologies, notably in contexts of security crises, economic difficulties and/or social distancing, in which these resources become essential for interactions between physically distant people. The emphasis of the proposal is on teaching/learning in Architecture, Urbanism and Landscaping (AUP), but discussions can establish interfaces and dialogues with other fields of knowledge, in related areas. The potential and limits of virtual environments are questioned as a simulation of environments for interpersonal relationships of exchange and production of knowledge in an academic context and how issues of meaning are dealt with in these educational virtual environments, especially in a field in which historically direct perception, experience and multisensory experience of physical and social space are valued. We welcome articles that contribute to the distinction of concepts and to better outline these new forms of interaction in the field of education in AUP.

Session Chair : Maísa Veloso.