Strengths

Big events and mass tourism

After Covid, communities expressed a renewed need for physical spaces that could respond to their demands for relationships, meaning and proximity. As Elena Granata (2021) writes, “it is the mixing, the biodiversity and the possibility of doing several things at the same time that give value to a place“. Therefore, what are the real opportunities and concrete legacies that tourism and major events offer cities? How can we reconcile the media and disruptive effects of major investment for specific events with the need to live in everyday places? How to respect the delicate balance between the need to revitalise local economies and the new global tourism industry? Never before have cities and territories had more to do with time than with space: what are the tools and strategies that urban planning must use to harness the forces generated by major events and tourism, and not succumb to them? How can we resist gentrification and revitalise communities?

Suggested but not exclusive themes:

Hyper-tourism vs. responsible tourism;
Tourism and Heritage: Opportunity or Threat?;
Major events and everyday life: rules and perspectives;
The Airbnb phenomenon and low-cost tourism;
Gentrification: what are we missing?

Living, working, well-being

Since 2006, the world population living in urban areas has exceeded that living in rural areas – in 1960 it was 30%; today it is more than 57%. However, only part of this population lives in “cities”, nearly a third lives in low- and very low-density suburbs.
“Cities” are – or should be – “complex” and privileged places where people, economic activities, services, skills and information are concentrated, and therefore where society’s growth processes should originate. The creation of a favourable living and working environment, the promotion of an adequate environmental quality and the guarantee of an infrastructure system that makes the urban environment liveable and services accessible are therefore the prerogatives of a balanced scenario aimed at the well-being of citizens and users of the city. The continuous and increasingly rapid evolution (or involution?) of contemporary society calls for (a return to) increasingly hybrid spaces: for education (schools and universities), residence (temporary and in an accessible free market), health (hospitals, places for personal care and well-being), access to the arts and spaces for cultural growth, even consumption and leisure have different needs than in the recent past. How can we act on the physical space (public and private) and the environment in the post-Covid era? How can individual behaviour and ambitions be directed towards sustainable lifestyles? What projects and tools should be put in place to achieve a true Renaissance of the City?

Suggested but not exclusive themes:

Housing standards and flexible solutions (for healthy, beautiful, and safe cities);
Social housing between public housing and the free market;
Entrepreneurship in a “liquid society” and a rigid labour market;
Urban acupuncture, tactical urbanism, and transformation rules.

Real estate finance and ethical crowdfunding

In recent decades, the real estate sector has changed from an investment characterised by high land consumption and negative environmental impacts to a more responsible logic focused on urban regeneration. Today’s investment logic is increasingly focused on the environmental and social impacts of development projects.
The availability of finance for residential and commercial investments has led to the growth of community-based forms of finance based on the crowdfunding mechanism, as well as an increase in the number of potential property investors.
The session calls for a comparison of research and best practices exploring changes in the logic of real estate investment and the role of crowdfunding tools.

Suggested but not exclusive themes:

Corporate real estate and urban regeneration;
Brownfield and greenfield investments;
Ethical investors in real estate;
Real estate crowdfunding.

Crisis, conflict, security

In contemporary urban environments, not only in the suburbs of large cities, we can recognise a widespread social unease resulting from a crisis of the city. In fact, “urban security”, on the one hand, evokes the sphere within which to ensure prevention and repression with respect to potential damage, and on the other a value (the “safe and welcoming” city), to be preserved, guaranteed and promoted precisely because security (understood as a stable quality of life) cannot be ensured without an adequate quality of services, infrastructures and public space and for public use, nor without civil coexistence and social inclusion.
But the “crisis” to which we can refer is also the one that follows armed conflicts and even terrorism. They constitute one of the main causes of damage and destruction of urban heritage, the outcome not only of “military” necessity but also of strategies to nullify the identity and historical memory of the enemy, to which cultural heritage constitutes “living testimony”. While cultural heritage is threatened in peacetime, during social unrest and armed conflicts the most serious damage is done, not only because these cause the loss of something unique and irreplaceable – starting with human life – but also psychologically affect communities.
The session will discuss the actors, dynamics and projects that, operating in the space of the city, denounce from case to case the need to improve the quality of living environments as a result of (more or less enduring) crises and conflicts: between social classes, peoples and ethnic groups.

Suggested but not exclusive themes: