Track 04 PLACEMAKING, URBAN DESIGN AND HERITAGE CONVERSATION

Track chairs: N. Alaily-Mattar, Jin Xu, Elisa Privitera 

Cities face increasing demands for climate adaptation, requiring multiple actors to negotiate necessary transformations in relation to social, cultural and spatial qualities of existing urban environments. Rising temperatures, flooding, biodiversity loss and pressures to decarbonise mobility demand a transition from predominantly grey infrastructure towards greener environments. Yet such transitions are neither purely technical nor environmentally neutral. They may reinforce existing inequalities, but they can also provide opportunities to challenge historically embedded socio-economic dynamics. Urban design can contribute in this regard by influencing quality of place, social belonging and stewardship, while engaging with questions of heritage conversation, urban transformation and climate adaptation.

The track invites critical perspectives, concepts, models and practices that address the relationship between placemaking, heritage conservation, and ecological transitions. Contributions may engage with nature-based solutions, biomimicry, fourth nature, design with nature, urban ecologies, heritage conservation and regeneration, community-driven innovations as well as the institutional infrastructures and enabling conditions, through which urban design ideas are translated into practice. 

The track also welcomes critical perspectives on the potential negative or unintended consequences of place-making experimentations and urban design approaches, including questions of unequal access, green gentrification and competing claims on limited urban space. The track is explicitly interested in case studies from different geographical, political and institutional contexts worldwide, rather than privileging approaches originating in particular regions. 

This track aims to address the following key questions:

• How can urban design contribute to the transformation of urban
  environments from grey to green and what are the roles of various
  actors and institutions in this process?
• What new design approaches, governance models and policies does urban
  transformation require?
• How do such transformations reconcile or conflict with heritage
  conversation needs?
• How can urban transformation that focuses on climate adaptation
  strengthen rather than undermine social equity, belonging and
  existing place identities?
• What can we learn from place-making concepts and practices emerging
  from diverse contexts around the world?

Keywords: Transformative power of design; adaptation to climate change, decarbonisation, Biodiversity net gain, land use conflicts, biomimicry, fourth nature, standards