PRESENTATION: ARCHITECTURE, ARCHAEOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY CITY PLANNING “State of knowledge in the digital age”

In discussions on urbanism, the need to involve new actors has been a major theme of recent debate. In this field, throughout Europe, various ways of allowing citizens to take a more direct part in planning is stressed. It is also important to look at the role or lack of role played by particular research fields. Architecture plays a major role in city planning. While archaeology has become increasingly involved in field projects in urban environments, the discipline seldom plays an important role in city planning. In several countries and par ticular cities this situation has been questioned during the last decades. In Sweden, certain studies indicate an increased interest in an active involvement of archaeology from the part of individual municipalities and provincial governments, and even on the state level in certain cases. In France, Lavendhomme at Inrap has discussed various possible new kinds of uses of archaeology in the planning process, and similar discussions start to appear in other countries. In the UK, archaeologists are increasingly involved in mitigating heritage impacts of building projects at the design stage rather than during construction (excavating). To take just one example, in Sweden the archaeologist Stefan Larsson has developed a project with the municipality of Kalmar, in which city planners, architects and archaeologists collaborate in making suggestions for a city plan in a segment of the city. In this workshop we will focus on possible new ways of collaboration between architects and archaeologists. We wish to open a new kind of communication between these research fields and related praxis. The urban process creates complex physical and social environments. The series of meetings between scholars to which these proceedings belong have right now explored three towns: Gothebourg, Firenze and Valencia. These three explorative and briefly discussed examples, gave the occasion to measure ideas and theories with three cities in different countries and settings, and with different historical trajectories, the way the urban landscape is formed and changed has been analysed. The role of particular larger intentional projects and their design and imagery is one of the factors discussed, but also other variables has been addressed. The idea and use of the metaphor of the organic, and its varied applications and effects is in the centre of attention. The reading of the context is now more complex than ever. Our time had been quickly populated with the presence of the past, from the recognization of ancient traces to the recent industrial residuals: the migration of production processes, their variation, switching to new procedures in favour of changing needs and new requirements to restore healthier environments, led to the creation, within about a century, a substantial change in the urban asset. A change that on principle has led natural or agricultural areas to be included into large and small cities, sometimes becoming places of abandonment and decay in a time shorter than a lifetime. The potential comprehension of the past and reuse the opportunity of reuse for abandoned spaces only sometimes takes place in an appropriate form, in many cases meet instead stagnation, the completing of a transformation into non-place that brings these spaces to shrink and disappear from perception. The possible contributions from archaeology include questions of conservation, diffusion of archaeological knowledge by different means, but also other fields, including practical knowledge on the development of particular districts over time, general knowledge in comparative studies of urbanism, questions of design or questions of “gestalt” in urban settings, and the intersections between archaeology, architecture and public art. We hope this workshop will help to open this field, and that it will be followed by other scholarly meetings on more limited particular cases and questions and, potentially, by a larger conference building on the workshop’s outcomes.