An intereseting workshop co-hosted by the Manchester Architecture Research Centre (MARC) University of Manchester, UK and The Urban Plaza, Osaka City University, Japan.

from sed.manchester.ac.uk

Copy pasted from their url:

Convened by Dr Albena Yaneva, 11-12 November 2010, Manchester

Urban theory often fails to capture the practical relation between the large scale and the modification of the human and nonhuman associations. The prevailing approaches to cities either embrace a phenomenological understanding to tackle the urban as being the result of subjective, personalized, individualized visions, or sustain a purely objectivist understanding of cities as material infrastructures, maps, and artefacts. Most of these frameworks lead to abstractions that hamper a better understanding of the urban. Instead, this workshop aims at exploring the city as en entity that can only be grasped in concreto. Accounting in a variety of ways(through interviews, archival sources, participant observation, photo- and video-ethnography)the numerous traces left by all the humans and nonhumans who circulate through cities, the participants in the workshop will provide realistic accounts of cities inspired by original fieldwork they have carried out in different parts of the world. Following these accounts, we will attempt to question, and when possible, to dissolve the traditional distinctions between city natures and city cultures, between people moving through cities and the things in a city that makes us move.

The papers will be published in a special issue of the international journal City, Culture and Society

11-12 November 2010
1.69/1.70 Humanities Bridgeford Street
The University of Manchester

full program here.

RAX!

Yann Bona