Panels and speakers > Speaker list > Carboni Alessandro

Urban narrative in Asia. Art Explorations and Urban Ethnography. Art like useful instrument to narrate and to design cities and new landscapes.

Today the utopia is embodied by the city. We do not have other places where to realize our utopia. And if we do not realize it, everything is destined to explode. We must act immediately, then, and be interested in the city from close up: it is the place in which the next generations' fears and hopes concentrate. (Augè, 2007)
 
The city today embodies a place where fears, hopes, transformations, dreams and changes are dancing one with others creating new landscapes. Our urban future can be marvelous or frightening: its development it's totally in our hands. Like researchers we must oversee. Observation and analysis are necessaries instruments to narrate the city and also to understand the main needs of the citizens and to imagine future developments for the urban and periurban landscapes. In the specific case of the analysis of the asiatic territories, the ethnographic tool it is an useful instrument for the urban narrative.
It enters in a wider ambit, which is related not only to human beings but also to the places and their interactions, both in cultural and antropological fields.
Art and photographs, videos and any other iconic and audio-visual representation of the reality can be used inside the social, cultural and urban planning research. Art instruments can became tools to describe some aspects of the reality (like new urban transformations) but also creative methodology to awake interest in urban areas.

Images, for example, can be socially, historically, culturally interpreted and interpretable; they form a “dense description” of reality (Geertz, 1973), by providing the social research with information that cannot be obtained in other ways (Membretti, 2009).Video or performative actions can be utilized like communicative instruments related to certain specific territorial areas or territorial issues. The panel is open to explicative and practical contributions where can be also presented urban narrative of the speakers.