29 September - 1 October 2010
Venue: Triest (I)
Worldwide, the run on cities keeps going on. The UN predicts that in 2030 61% of the world´s population will live in cities. Already today, mega- or meta-cities such as Mumbai, Shanghai, Beijing, Sao Paulo, Mexico City or Lagos with their extreme contrast between wealth and poverty suggest a kind of anarchic urbanisation in the countries of the South.
Also European cities change radically: migration and mobility undermine the feeling of togetherness in many urban societies. Cities have become complicated entities in which ethnically, socially and culturally segregated communities have developed. Often, extended leeways for individualised lives and collective ways of living come along with increasing inequality and conflicts about identity and self-assertion. At the same time, cities develop the seedbed of new, mostly cultural ways of expressing the citizens´ will, of the creation of new publics or ways of participating. The city becomes a mirror of social challenges and a laboratory of cultural and social developments, where questions of economy and labour, of social belonging and the acceptance of cultural self-image and the image of others, of political participation and justice, are newly negotiated.
Cultural and citizenship education have to reposition themselves, since forms of participation and development opportunities become vital issues in cities. Bringing architects, artists, sociologists, urban developers, multipliers and practitioners in cultural and citizenship education together, the conference intends to discuss these challenges from the point of view of different disciplines, to exchange experiences and to search for creative stimulations for an urban cultural and citizenship education.
