Pop-up City. Searching for instant urbanity
3 videos • 6 views • by City Space Architecture In June 2013 City Space Architecture started to work on the photography research project "Pop-up City" in the city of Bologna. "Pop-up City" is curated by Our President Dr Luisa Bravo and has been developed in collaboration with the photographer Fabio Mantovani. Working on different locations, the "Pop-up City" project intended to highlight existing places with a potential for public life, looking for invisible dimensions of the public realm, searching for an "ordinary magic" along everyday streets, squares and neighborhoods, delivering new powerful images of the urban world. We explored in particular those suburban places, generally disconnected from the mental representation of the urban narrative plot of public spaces made of beauty and fascination, with no identity and continuity with the historic environment. We were moving further from the European mental attitude that immediately links the concept of “public space” to the idea of a traditional designed square. These suburban places are part of the everyday existence, but common people are accustomed to experience them as fragments in a sort of jump-cut urbanism, affected by the use of cars. We pass through but we don’t notice. The suburban world can be banal, sometimes ugly, not interesting, but full of life and can transform itself into an enchanting environment. People simply have to understand a new kind of urbanity, made of small, temporary, spontaneous and creative episodes of emotional exchange. A pop-up city is overlapping on the existing designed city. It is unexpected, unconventional and exciting. It is inexpensive and freely accessible to everyone. It creates vibrant energies, embedding life and aspirations. It changes your perception, but only if you are ready to embrace it. The Pop-up City project is trying to document what is now largely undocumented. We are representing the city of Bologna, but actually the Pop-up City could be anywhere. Read more: http://www.cityspacearchitecture.org/...