Urban Ethics under Conditions of Crisis

The following sections are included:

• Contents
• Preface
• About the Editors
• Contributors

If planning and design of the city, of ‘polis’ seem to be crucial for the existence and moreover for the control of social formation, thus crucial for social ethics, then the recent interest of planners and urban designers as well as of state administration for ‘informal’ urbanism, must be appreciated as surpassing restricted technical approaches. It rather indicates new political tendencies and, furthermore, a general epistemic reversal concerning scientific tendencies and social ethics in general…

Pressing economic, environmental and social crises underline the need for a redefinition of the dominant perspectives and values in the fields of architectural composition, urban design and architectural education. Perhaps the time has come to think anew about design ethics under the above contemporary conditions of crisis. In the present paper I will focus on the concept of the void. Usually, the void is understood as an absence of matter, an empty negativity. I will challenge this idea, claiming that a novel understanding of the complexities of the notion of void space could transform contemporary architectural and urban design ethics and challenge established educational priorities. In other words, the overcoming of a crisis condition entails a radical shift of the epistemological frameworks that inform our educational hierarchies. In order to begin doing so, I will develop a brief outline of a genealogy of the fundamental metamorphoses of the concept of the void from Antiquity to Postmodernism. This genealogical mapping will serve as a background for my final argument concerning a new educational, design and spatial ethos of ‘immaterial urbanity’ that can provide answers to the pressing social, environmental and economic crises of our contemporary, hypermodern times.

During the euphoric meta-modern age, most architects practiced their profession disengaged from socio-political and ethical concerns, largely embracing the spirit of globalism in their work However, in the past years, many crises have obliged architects to adopt a different mindset: their work is often required to engage diverse interacting forces and new processes, and is expected to be a catalyst for change with direct impact on society, culture, economy and the environment…

Athens and Rome are two cities that have been nourishing for long centuries the global fund of collective memory, imaginaries and myth. The Sacred Rock of the Athenian Acropolis is the global epitome of democracy, classical beauty and urban constitution. The Roman Forum, alongside the neighboring Colosseum, converge imperial power, structural prowess and urban relevance, but also death as spectacle. Both of these domains have deeply shaped western architecture, urban planning and aesthetic theory. Yet, while there have been isolated analyses, as well as an 18th-century precedent in terms of art historical wars of taste around the classicism of Athens and Rome, a comparison between their respective archaeological cores and the present impact thereof is still oddly missing. In view of this omission, this chapter contributes towards the exploration of the utmost classical sites of Athens and Rome and their aspects, both physical and metaphysical, as well as the moral aspects of the incorporation of the past into the present in the two cities.

Since 2015 the refugee ‘crisis’ has prevailed European discussions not only about migration or humanitarianism but also about the prospects of multicultural Europe. Within a context of only a few years, European as well as national policies have become harsher while the ‘refugee issue’ has been used as a means for further entrenching nationalist and far-right politics. Nevertheless, people seeking asylum continue to arrive and settle – even temporarily – in European places, reshaping localities, everyday life and politics. Thus, this contribution turns towards the urban and discusses the role of refugees in transforming living together in European cities. In the specific context of nowadays Europe, it examines the position of asylum seekers through the lens of liminality; a position of potentialities as well as of danger and risk for them, as a threshold. Following the work of Stuart Hall, it questions where asylum-seekers can be considered as a signifier of living together in present day Europe; a signifier upon which representations of a future Europe and meaning-making practices and power relations are projected upon.

Sustainability of urban space as a system can be explained in terms of the balance of all its urban characteristics over time. The maintenance of spatial diversity emerges as an important problematic in rapidly developing urban spaces, where the established balance can be disturbed by the sudden spatial interventions. For this reason, it is necessary to discuss how that balance is affected by new projects. In this study, a part of a dense central urban area of Istanbul is assessed using a conceptual approach to spatial diversity. The contemporary structure and the sense of place of the former mostly residential district turned to high-rise office zone has an overlapping history with the modernization of Istanbul. This study, informed by spatial readings on conceptual classification of urban systems, explores how the district in question has been affected by new high-rise office buildings. It reveals the impact of global capital on urban diversity by examining the urban space as a whole so as to determine the change in spatial diversity balance.

The question “How should one live in the city” is of central interest for the interdisciplinary research group “Urban Ethics: Conflicts about the good and proper conduct of life in 20th and 21st century cities”. In eight different cities it examines the answers to this question and therefore analyses ethical controversies about the good and proper way of urban living, which that condense in problematizations and models of an “ethical” conduct of urban life as well as diverse negotiation processes. One of the research group’s sub-projects focuses on the city of Berlin and will be the subject of this article…

This essay is an analysis of monuments and memorial locations in Serbia, particularly in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, during the contemporary transition phase. Estethical and artistic, but also political side of these monuments and their role in the early 21st century society is being observed in the paper. The research looks into the history of the monuments on the territory of Belgrade and explores the states of the monument heritage from the previous (socialist) period of the second half of the 20th century and cases of demolishing or replacing monuments with those ideologically relevant later on. The paper includes mapping of the new monuments built in memory of the unsettled disintegration of SFRJ during the 1990s as well as their urban context. It also looks for the reasons of non-existence of so-called counter-monuments or participatory monuments in Belgrade and for building of a larger number of classical statues. It has been concluded that the monuments in Belgrade became the ‘stumbling stone’ of every constructive analysis and criticism of the urbanities and their memorial places, but at the same time ‘invisible’ not only in the way described by Robert Musil. Amongst these two determinants, the public monuments in Belgrade built in the beginning of the 21st century have been observed here.

This chapter presents a case of moral geography in the urban environment of Exarcheia, a neighborhood of downtown Athens that is well known for political riots and social disorder. A historical overview is made of the urban development of the area during focusing on the period immediately after the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Greek State. Two different notions of ethics are exposed in the urban environment: The first, urban morality, is the outcome of a designing actor, through a top down approach that takes place through a deliberate design that results in a ‘drawboard’ way of development of the city. The second, urban ethics, is a spontaneous way of developing the city, impromptu, without a pre-existing plan based on tradition, habit and disposition and follows a bottom down approach. These two notions are found to be in constant confrontation in the public realm of the city and their conflict becomes visible in the urban fabric of our case study area.

It is said that architecture is the “third skin” of the human body – that is, after our clothing and actual skin. It surrounds our community, promotes physical and mental well-being and responds to our needs by interconnecting the environment with our activities and emotions. Public spaces in particular can influence lifestyle choices and daily routines. Although architecture is generally centered on people’s needs, environmental design tends to work towards broader socio-economic and political ends. In this respect, even large public spaces, which are meant to serve whole communities, might actually be limited due to restrictions imposed for public usage. The latter have been shown to affect individuals’ activities and perceptions as well as social well-being. While public spaces have been designed and developed through centuries, they can be designed in a multitude of ways (finally appearing as e.g. semi-private, semi-public, and other). Thus, the impact of public space design on community behavior and lifestyle can be seismic as fundamental qualities of built and outdoor space may vary considerably and impact differently on user comfort, their sense of inter-personal and socio-spatial proximity, connectivity, usability and livability. In this chapter, design elements of housing estates are discussed in connection with their impacts on user perceptions, sensations, behavior and emotions. The ultimate goal is to highlight that public space design should be reimagined and envisioned to enhance positive emotions and well-being from its early design stages.

The article claims that the absence of an integrated approach to the coast, first in the dearth of visualizations and representations, and consequently, an absence of designs, resides on a cultural denial of the coast as a landscape. The historical coast does not exist as such, but as a mere edge, or vantage point to be constantly redefined by and reclaimed from the sea. This lack informs and builds a tradition that seeks to avoid the inherent uncertainty in coastal dynamics through engineered control…

Constructional practices appear to be substantial not only for the production of built material environment, but also for the formation of social life in general; the formation of social imagery and social beliefs of all sorts, the application and development of scientific knowledge and thus the formation of social behavior on individual or collective scale. In consequence, the expressive changes of constructional practices may represent, accordingly, the shift of cultural interest from one corpus of ethical premises to another. It is in this very context that the interest for landscape connotes, in neoteric and contemporary era, the general cultural orientation of the Western societies, towards environmental sensitivity. We usually associate this environmentally friendly approach to the shift from hardscape construction to the symbiosis of the building structures with active green landscape formations. However this change of interest indicates at the same time, for contemporary culture, the important shift of scientific paradigms towards topological awareness and computer aided representation technology.