The Urban Studies Institute organises workshops, in which a diverse range of texts, projects, plans and ideas are presented and critically examined. The emphasis is on networking, exchange of ideas and confrontation with different perspectives. The format is adapted to the subject matter.
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Multidimensional urbanism: speculative imaginations and volumes of the tall building
USI Lunch Seminar | 12 March 2025
Andrew Harris, USI visiting scholar
Urban scholars have been increasingly questioning the flat and horizontal way that cities have historically tended to be represented and understood. This greater recognition of the inherent vertical dimensions of urban life has been accentuated by a recent rapid three-dimensional growth of many cities around the world through high-rise construction, new forms of multi-levelled mobility as well as a growing emphasis on underground spaces. This heightened attention to the vertical characteristics and qualities of cities has necessitated enhanced cross-disciplinary perspectives in urban research and engagement, so far only fitfully realised, that investigate not only the role of architecture, planning and geography in shaping urban skylines but consider the scope of engineering, hydrology, religion, literature, digital technology, and many other approaches and matters, in conceiving and coordinating the three-dimensional built environment.
Drawing from some recent and ongoing research, this presentation will foreground two key ways of investigating cities in three-dimensions. First, it will explore a range of imaginative experiments with high-rise landscapes, including from artists, film-makers and photographers, that can open up alternative perspectives around the role of verticality in contemporary urbanisation. Secondly, it will examine how the production of volume can be understood as central to the way three-dimensional built space is created, arranged and maintained. The presentation will focus in particular on the high-rise complex of Canary Wharf in London, constructed on the site of the former West India Docks and now a major financial centre. It will consider how imagination and volume intersect not only in the way this complex was first anticipated and assembled in the 1980s but in how its contemporary forms and features build on ideas and calculations at this site from the early nineteenth-century.
Practical details
- When: Wednesday 12 March 2025, 12.30 - 2 p.m.
- Where: UAntwerp City Campus, room D.328, Grote Kauwenberg 18
- A vegetarian lunch is included.
Upcoming lunch seminars
Côme Salvaire, USI visiting scholar
25 April 2025, 12.30 - 2 p.m.
City Campus, Room SJ.213
Miki Sugiura, USI visiting scholar
7 May 2025, 12.30 - 2 p.m.
City Campus, Room SJ.115