Search
|

Spotlight on the city

  • Publish On 4 October 2023
  • Hervé Bougon
  • 5 minutes

Hervé Bougon is a film programmer and co-founder of Close-Up, a film festival dedicated to architecture, cities and landscapes. Close Up uses fiction to question the way we live, and year after year continues its work of discovering and raising awareness of major urban issues by bringing to the screen representations of urban architectural culture.

Bibliography

explore

Article

Peri-Urban Land Stakes

Michel Desvigne

Article

Peri-Urban Land Stakes

The city of the Anthropocene boasts a new relation to nature that emerges from the elaboration of a novel continuum between urban spaces and the biosphere. This living dimension, which has long been suppressed by modernist planning schemes, has nevertheless always been at the core of the work and of the practice of landscape design. Michel Desvigne speaks of his attachment to the physical dimension of things, of how he envisions urbanization as a landscape designer and of his work on peri-urban territories and scattered housing—a key urban issue that he seeks to “mend” by working on the “lisière”, the intermediary landscape situated between the city and the agricultural landscape. He calls for a more significant commitment on behalf of public authorities, but also for a new vision for agriculture. Michel Desvigne is a landscape designer and architect, director of MDP Agency, Grand Prix in Urban Planning.

Discover
Article

Urban Psychoanalysis: from Performance to Action

collectif ANPU (Agence Nationale de la Psychanalyse Urbaine)

Article

Urban Psychoanalysis: from Performance to Action

Faced with the acultural approach and functionalist universalization that came in the wake of the sterile smart cities, we have seen the return of work that deals with the imagination and the anchoring to the urban environment. Laurent Petit has initiated a multidisciplinary collective, the Agence Nationale de Psychanalyse Urbaine, adding urban and architectural skills to his practice in order to propose a psychoanalysis of cities. A protocol of restitution of residents’ voices allows the living dynamics of territories to be highlighted, but also to explore the urban imaginations at work, revealing a personality, a rhythm, and also the pathologies of the city. Becoming a participative movement, the agency’s artistic and therapeutic exploration progressively moved beyond simple performance to become a tool for action on the territory. This urban psychoanalysis provides an intimate understanding of the territory and the environment, opening up the possibility for projects of co-construction to participate in the fabrication of the city. Interview with Laurent Petit, Charles Altorffer, and Fabienne Quéméneur, ANPU (National Agency for Urban Psychoanalysis)

Discover
Article

Cities : Idle speculations on their future

Lars Lerup

Article

Cities : Idle speculations on their future

Being an American of Swedish origin, continuously going back and forth between Houston, Los Angeles and Stockholm, allows us to distance ourselves from the urban fact – literally and figuratively – and to speak with discernment. Three categories of cities seem to converge on this increasingly widespread idea of a generic and globalized city. It is interesting to understand how they are generated. Is it the economic system, the administrative power, the populations, the general lack of interest in living together, or all of that, which guides the making of our cities? Lars Lerup is an architecture professor at the Rice School of Architecture in Houston.

Discover