On Nov 6-8, Stephen Kieran will be a panelist at the international symposium, Re-Imagining Cities, Urban Design after the Age of Oil, presented by the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design and the Penn Institute for Urban Research, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.
This event marks the 50th Anniversary of the 1958 "Conference on Urban Design Criticism" conference, also sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which laid the groundwork for urban design education during the era of the redevelopment of cities. That conference included Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, I.M. Pei, Ian McHarg and others, many of whom were not widely known at the time, but who went on to educate a generation of urban designers.
The conference aims to focus discussion on urban design and development throughout the world, including the rapidly urbanizing cities of Asia and Africa as well as the more developed world. Many of the leading thinkers about the impacts of global energy shortages and climate change will set the framework for discussion, including Robert Socolow, David Orr, and Saleem Huq.
Urban design educators from around the world will discuss the need to organize education to produce the next generation of designers capable of responding to the challenges. To this end, the conference participants will work to draft a manifesto for urban design education in the next era.
Anyone can follow the conference live online at Next American City, as well as on the sites of all of the participating bloggers:
Lloyd Alter, Treehugger and Planet Green
Ryan Avent, Grist
Nate Berg, Planetizen
Andrew Blum, Wired and Metropolis
Randy Crane, Urban Planning Research
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Architect, Metropolis, and The New York Times Magazine
Diana Lind, Next American City
