Presentation Title: When the countryside regenerates the paths for the ecological transition

What does an observation of territories, with a point of view halfway between architecture and geography, teach us about their composition and about the perspectives of their sustainable development? The presentation will be based on two concepts: the granularity, as a way of describing territories based on the distribution of the human settlements; and the deployed locality, as a process of development of activities oriented towards the ecological transition. We will conclude that these discrete figures of the urban, because of the existing and potential symbiose that can be observed between human settlements and their non-human environment, can make a major contribution to the ecological transition.

Bio: Antoine Brès is an architect and holds a PHD in urban planning and development from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne where he was an associate professor. He has also been a visiting professor at Tongji University and Shanghai University. He is a researcher associated with the Geographie-Cités and AUSser laboratories and a practitioner with the Brès+Mariolle office. His works focuse on the grain and the frame of territories in a perspective of ecological transition. His fields of study are the spaces inherited from the rural, suburban areas or new countrysides, apprehended as discrete figures of a generalized urbanization. His research and work cover both alternative mobilities, the diversity of the spatial distribution of human settlements and, more recently, the notion of locality approached through the prism of the ecological transition. He is currently co-directing two theses, one of which is on city-countryside relations. He was awarded, with his partner Béatrice Mariolle, the 2020 Medal in urban planning and development of the french Academy of Architecture. In recent years he has published two books: Les figures discrètes de l’urbain, à la rencontre des réseaux et des territoires (MétisPresses, 2015), and Territoire frugal, la France des campagnes à l’heure des métropoles, with F. Beaucire et B. Mariolle (MétisPresses, 2017)

Presentation Title: Elements in desakota, Yangtze River Delta, China

Yangtze River delta is a case of an agricultural economy: a “growth without development” or “involution”(Huang, 1990) through the history. The endogenous demand to exhaust the surplus labor has produced an incredible dense village and town system where craft and industries are located, based on a fine network of river and canals. The delta today is a territory with city cores but also a vast dispersed urbanization where the agricultural and non-agricultural activities and spaces are mixed and interlinked. The first part of the presentation tries to present a process of different urbanization in Yangtze River Delta and the different production models implemented in this process. The second part tries to exam the space built through the urbanization process from an elementary point of view, as a starting point to imagine a transformation of the territory.

Bio: Qinyi Zhang is an architect and urbanist in Studio Paola Viganò (before 2015 as Studio Secchi-Viganò) since 2009, a leading designer and project manager responsible for urban and landscape projects, metropolitan visions, and exhibitions. He is currently the coordinator of the interdisciplinary design team in the two large-“ring parks” in Antwerp. From 2018 to 2020, he was a Post-Doc researcher at the Lab-U and Habitat Research Center in EPFL, Lausanne, working on research projects including the Consultation Greater Geneva, and “TOD-IS-RUR Transit Oriented Development for Inclusive and Sustainable Rural-Urban Regions”- a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – Innovative Training Network project. Meanwhile, he was teaching at the design studio of the Master Semester. He has been invited as a jury member and external critic in Master programs and workshops in Europe and China. He received the dipoloma of PhD in Urbanism at IUAV Venezia in 2018, and his thesis “Elements in desakota, Yangtze River Delta, China” was partially exhibited in the collateral event “HORIZONTAL METROPOLIS” at the Venice Biennale 2016. He received the master degree from the European Postgraduate Master in Urbanism (EMU) in TU Delft and IUAV Venezia, and the Bachelor Degree in Architecture in Zhejiang University in China.

Presentation title: Symbiotic Urbanism: Assessment, Objects and Tool

Symbiotic urbanism first needs to establish a systematic assessment framework on resource and impact like the 6- Dimension Assessment. The main objects of urban symbiosis are the ecological environment, historical traces and the most important residents, and CIIM can be used as a tool to break down the professional threshold for residents to participate in urban design.

Bio: Weiwen Huang is the cofounder of the sustainable think tank/academy FuturePlus, also the main founder of Shenzhen Center for Design (SCD) at 2011 and the main founder/organizer of Urbanism\Architecture Bi-city Biennale (UABB) of Shenzhen from 2005 to 2015. He was Loeb Fellow ’09-’10 of Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, and the ex-Vice Chief Urban Planner of Urban Planning Bureau of Shenzhen Municipal. Weiwen maintains an independent research on urban design, alternative mobility, green infrastructure and public engagement urbanism. He pushed UABB and SCD as platforms for exchange and communication about urbanism and built environment.

Presentation Title: From the Pearl River Delta to the Greater Bay Area Megaregion: Producing the New Public Realm.

This presentation will discuss production of the emerging public realm of the Greater Bay Area in the Pearl River Delta, and address theoretical and practical possibilities for discussing public space in the context of megaregional developments in China.

Bio: Miodrag Mitrašinović is a Professor of Urbanism and Architecture at Parsons School of Design, The New School university. His scholarly work focuses on the role design plays as an agent of social and political change, and as a catalyst for critical urban transformations. His
research argues for the centrality of designing in the conceptualization, production, and representation of democratic and participatory urban space. His work also focuses on the generative capacity and infrastructural dimensions of public space, specifically at the intersections of urban and public design, socio-spatial justice, and public policy.

Miodrag is the co-editor of “The Public Space Reader” (Routledge 2021); “The Emerging Public Realm of the Greater Bay Area: Approaches to Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion” (Routledge 2021); “Cooperative Cities” (Journal of Design Strategies Vol. 8, 2018); editor of “Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion” (Routledge 2016); co-editor of “Travel, Space, Architecture” (Routledge 2009); and author of “Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space” (Routledge 2006).

Presentation title: Shifting forms of landscape, urbanism and collage in the Great Bay 1945-2020; a horizontal metropolis?

Landscape always formed a part of the of the Guangzhou- Hongkong territory’s rich urban fabric ranging from the traditional Imperial heritage, colonial interventions to the contemporary megacity corridor of the Great Bay. This paper will trace the presence of various garden city and ecological hypotheses, from Abercrombie, from Rowe’s Collage City and Roma Interrotta, to Jim Corner and Field Operations. Have these models, mixed with those used in the rapid urbanization of China in the last 30 years produced a new symbiotic reformulation of the horizontal metropolis?

Bio: David Grahame Shane studied at the Architectural Association, London (AA Dipl 1969), and at Cornell for an M.Arch (Urban Design 1972) and an Architectural and Urban History PhD (1978). He taught at the AA in the 1970’s for Alvin Boyarsky, before starting at Columbia in the 1980’s, in UD since 1991. He has lectured widely and published in Europe, USA and Asia. He is the author of Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory (2005) and Urban Design Since 1945; a Global Perspective (2011) and co-edited “Sensing the 21st Century City: Close-Up and Remote” (Architectural Design 2005). His article “Gardens as Public Space; A Century of Continuity and Change in the Great Bay Area” appeared in The Emerging Public Realm of the Great Bay Area (2021 Taylor and Francis). His “Notes Towards an Intellectual Biography of Colin Rowe 1938- 78” will appear in the forthcoming The Urban Design Legacy of Colin Rowe (ORO Editions 2022). A version will appear in the new Chinese translation of Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City by Professor Tong Ming (2022). Shane’s Oral History of Archigram Interviews will appear on the m+ museum website in 2022.