Title: Cities And Geographical Territories Of Conflict: The Past Present And Future Of Political Instability
Chair:
Prof. Em. Konstantinos Moraitis
School of Architecture
National Technical University Athens
Abstract/Description:
Innovative proposals of architects, landscape architects and urban planners are usually inscribed in an optimistic context of reference, proposing projects that could be realized in a state of positive social development.
Western 18th Enlightment promises were portraying a bright cultural and political freedom, characterized by ameliorated political ethics and possibility of prosperous social development. The French Revolution however was closely escorted by the first intense nationalistic claims, by the brutality of successive wars and of many fruitless revolutions desperately demanding augmented peoples’ freedom. At the same period, impoverished, homeless citizens continued to gather in the urban slums of the big ‘developed’ European or Western metropolises. It was in the same overall socio political milieu that colonization took command, merciless in its fierce expansion for the continuous destruction of age-old civilizations fatally condemned by the neoteric European and Western conquest.
Promises of Enlightened Reason never stop to be reproduced, though they had to face two World Wars and many minor bloody military conflicts, though they never stopped to face fluxes of war refugees and economic immigrants. Bright urban plans and flamboyant architectural facades could be created and then collapse, in Guernica, Hiroshima and even in capital cities of Europe, in London, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow; Paris to be saved only by chance.
Being next year in 2022, in the year of the hundredth anniversary of the destruction of the Hellenic part of Smyrna in Minor Asia, of the hundredth anniversary of the destruction of the Geek and Armenian populations of Turkey, of the hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Greek refugees from Minor Asia and the Black Sea, we dare not to insist on the optimistic vision of our profession. We prefer to remind to the participants of this conference that the Covid 19 epidemic is not the only reason for the social and political uncertainty of the contemporary era. We prefer to insist on the fact that refugees will continue to arrive in despair in the ‘developed’ countries of Europe and North America, asking for help.
Let us now conclusively describe a number of different subjects, which could be associated to the central thematic proposal of the session:
- Promises of social and political amelioration constantly disproved: their correlation to the urban context.
- Military incidents and urban destruction: the fatal destiny of the preexisting urban glamour and the war-hit urban population.
- War refugees and unavoidable economic immigration: camps and cities of refugees in the historic past and the geopolitical present.
- Refugees and immigrants in the neoteric and contemporary Greece: a possible homage to the 1922 Greek refugees and to the places of installation in their new cities of residence.
- The condition of the impoverished and homeless inhabitants in the past and present of the cities: a pilgrimage to the slums and to the ‘maps of poverty’ of the world.
- The thread of a possible decease: Covid 19 and its historic epidemic predecessors.
- Real urban calamities and their art presentation: the phobic description and the gothic despair in literature, painting, movie presentation, comic strip art and popular or rock gothic music.