Urban Research and Architecture:
Beyond Henri Lefebvre

The interdisciplinary conference Urban Research and Architecture: Beyond Henri Lefebvre brings together recent applications of Lefebvre's theory in order to develop new concepts for the analysis of contemporary processes of urbanization and to suggest new design tools for architecture and urbanism.

Rediscovered in the 1990’s, Lefebvre’s theory opened up new ways of understanding of processes of urbanization, their conditions and consequences at any scale of social reality: from the practices of everyday life, through the urban scale, to the global flows of people, capital, information and ideas. At the same time, this theory has the potential to relate urban research and design practices because of its programmatic questioning of the links between urban analysis, the critique of urbanism, and the vision of a new type of social space in the contemporary city.

This conference is a joint engagement of the Chair of Architecture Theory and the Lectureship of Sociology at the Department of Architecture ETH Zurich, in cooperation with the Delft School of Design at the Delft University of Technology and the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht).

The conference will take place at the ETH Zurich, November 24th–26th, 2009. It follows the symposium Rethinking Theory, Space and Production: Henri Lefebvre Today which took place at the TU Delft, November 11th–13th, 2008.

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