Anthony Averbeck

An international conference with lectures and open panel discussions held by the Institute for Sustainable Urbanism at TU Braunschweig in Germany was attended by Anthony Averbeck through support of the Center for Global Inquiry at the University of Virginia on November 18, 2015. More info can be found here: http://sustainableurbanism.de/blog/isu-talks-03/

In the current city-centred discourse, rural spaces are often dismissed as declining or stagnating. However, rural spaces also play a critical role in sustainable development, as an inextricably linked counterpart and complement to the growing city, as extraction sites, natural reservoirs, providing for ecosystem services or leisure spaces. The city and the countryside are evermore increasingly mutually reliant. A closer look at the countryside unveils a set of dynamics overlaying and changing rural space, beyond trends of depopulation and shutdown of public facilities. The once remote and quiet countryside is now traversed by global and regional flows of people, goods, waste, energy and information, interrelating it with the larger urban system, even bringing it to the frontlines of regional transformation and sustainability.

The conference proposes the following questions:
– How can the contemporary rural be conceived of and described?
– What new concepts for rural living currently exist?
– How are urbanisation and ruralisation processes connected?
– Can impulses for the design of urban space be drawn from the imagined and practiced connections between the urban and the rural?
– How can we formulate a (new) vision for ‘ruralism’?

KEYNOTES
Networked Urbanism | ecosistema urbano, Madrid
Learning from Landscape – Snøhetta’s Approach to Integrated Landscape (and) Architecture | Patrick Lüth, Snøhetta, Innsbruck
Hinterland | Stephan Petermann, OMA/AMO, Rotterdam

PANELS
International researchers will illuminate the notion of ruralism from architectural, cultural, gender, ecological, and political perspectives.
– Imagining Urbanisation/Ruralisation
– Redistributing Resources of urban-rural landscapes
– Small Town Life Worlds
– Possible urban-rural politics
– Re-Appropriating the Rural