As part of the first round of workshops of the conference, the Urban Laboratories session set out to explore questions of representation with regards to the new, new culture and experimentality. The three speakers, Marc Glaudemans, Pascal Gielen and Michelle Teran were introduced by Bas van Heur, post-doc at the Maastricht Virtual Knowledge Studio, Maastricht University. The three presentations were followed by short Q&A rounds.
The first speaker of the workshop, Mr. Marc Glaudemans, gave an extensive description of the School of Architecture in Tilburg, Netherlands, an institution which is rather professional than academic. Since 2006, one of the programmes of the university that he is involved in is Stadslab – the European Urban Design Laboratory. Stadslab is a consultancy organization that aims at being a knowledge centre supported by European experts. Cities can use Stadslab as an advisory tool for various urban problems they might encounter. The Stadslab team analyzes these problems in a laboratory or atelier environment with the goal of providing “strategies for the cities to develop,” Glaudemans explained. The end results are, therefore, conceptual frameworks that can be used for creative and sustainable urban development, as well as urban design scenarios and case studies. During the Q&A round, the issue of politics being intermingled with urban planning was raised, as well as the difficulty of integrating all the dimensions of an urban environment in the strategies developed by Stadslab. Nevertheless, Glaudemans acknowledged the fact that urban regeneration is not only a spatial problem, but also social, cultural and political.
The second presentation given by Pascal Gielen focused on the speaker’s research on visual artists in Flanders, Belgium. Mr. Gielen discussed how the art world is influenced by globalization. Supporting issues for that are numerous: acceleration of artistic careers, boom of creative cities, accumulation of artists, curators, etc., post-political ideology shifts and renegotiations of value regimes. The resulting global ‘meshwork’, as the speaker calls it, can be used to further analyze how the art world is currently differentiated. Two sets of oppositions were discussed in relation to each other: “high / low networked” art or artists and “development / product” – development seen as education, research, or academia, and product seen as market oriented art production. In the context of this four dimensional schemata, or the ‘Healthy art ecological system,’ Gielen sees smaller cities as weak passages in the global art world. Maastricht is one of these weak passages when it comes to art, and the speaker suggested that the city should take its spot on the graph in the high networked, development orientated corner. Furthermore, Maastricht should aim at being a “place to slow down, to reflect” Mr. Gielen said, going beyond the creative city idea.
The third and last speaker of the session was Michelle Teran, a practicing artist originally from Quebec, Canada, but active in urban art projects around the world. The artist gave the audience an insight into her work, which mostly consists of using media as guiding tools to explore a city and its narratives. Her works also contain a high level of performance, as she communicates with people on the streets in order to see how they create the meanings of their own city. In the first project described, Ms. Teran explored a city through two ways, a cartographic and a street dimension. She used different media to investigate the visual unity of a place, as well as spatial narratives that become part of the city’s fabric. The second project presented took place in Quebec, and it dealt with, as Ms. Teran put it “unofficial urban histories.“ The third and last work the speaker discussed was a project in Murcia, Spain, in which she used Google Earth to collect YouTube videos from a particular location, with the overall goal of creating a narrative.
In the concluding remarks of the workshop, the moderator emphasized the importance of experimental culture, and how hidden urban narratives are made visible through this experimenting process. However, the moderator said, we should be careful with “what we make visible and in relation to what.”
Text: Ana Maria Raus
