Transforming the Human City

重塑城市，以人为本

Date: May 30, 2022 (Mon)

Time: 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm (GMT+8)

Zoom ID: 924 2622 1232

Pass code: UGOD

Language: English

ABSTRACT

Abandoning the inhuman urban model of forcing humans to live and work in concrete boxes, I propose a totally new conception of the city. Rules coming from Biology suggest how to rebuild and repair cities and communities. This model assumes that we have inherited dead existing urban structures from an extinct civilization. We begin city rebuilding by creating human-scale adaptive design in the urban fabric on the ground, beginning with streets and urban space. Predominantly pedestrian, dense urban fabric containing green will link to vehicular and public transport. We will adapt and connect to existing buildings that are the most difficult to demolish, adapting them for life in the first few stories only. 

The living city consists of the newly-renovated mixed-use ground and the first 5-8 stories. The higher stories are best used for storage and temporary occupation. Also, all the living interiors will be rebuilt with color, detail, and ornament to provide a healing environment for their residents. Starting from a building's interior design, the communities will be involved and engaged in rebuilding and repairing their habitat. Any new structures must be adaptive to the existing ones, nearby or surrounded. Altogether, it may be possible to improve human-scale urbanization in existing, extremely dense inhuman urban fabric.

Related readings:

https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/6/1/3
https://ojs.emu.edu.tr/index.php/jurd/article/view/240
https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/12/2/27
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/13/6197
https://meetingoftheminds.org/the-future-of-cities-30605

SPEAKER

Dr. Nikos A. Salingaros is Professor of Mathematics and Architecture at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and is on the faculty of the Building Beauty Master’s Program. He has held guest professorships in Architecture at the Delft University of Technology, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Querétaro, Mexico, and Università di Roma III. 

An internationally recognized architectural theorist and urbanist, he is known for his original contributions applying Mathematics to Architecture. Salingaros helped to establish and further extend new disciplines such as Biophilia, Design Patterns, Complexity Theory, Neuro-design, the Fractal City, and the Network City. 

He obtained his PhD in Physics at Stony Brook University, being in contact with Nobel Prize winner Professor Chen-Ning Yang. Salingaros won the 2019 Stockholm Culture Award for Architecture, and shared the 2018 Clem Labine Award for Traditional Architecture with Michael W. Mehaffy. The author of seven monographs (four of which were translated into Chinese; see the following list) and almost 200 research papers, he directs Ph.D. students in architecture and urbanism at many institutions worldwide. 

Salingaros worked with visionary architect Christopher Alexander for twenty years in helping to edit Alexander’s four-volume book The Nature of Order. Mehaffy and Salingaros co-authored (together with other researchers) A New Pattern Language for Developing Regions (2019), an extension and update of the classic A Pattern Language (1977) by Christopher Alexander and colleagues, which has had a profound influence on software development. In the Planetizen surveys of “The 100 most important urban thinkers of all time”, Salingaros ranked 11th in 2009 and 26th in 2017. 

See Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Salingaros

Books written by speaker:
https://book.jd.com/writer/%E5%B0%BC%E7%A7%91%E6%96%AF%C2%B7A%C2%B7%E8%90%A8%E6%9E%97%E5%8A%A0%E7%BD%97%E6%96%AF_1.html

Organizer

This seminar is held by the Urban Governance and Design Thrust, one of the Thrusts under the Society Hub, HKUST(Guangzhou). It aims to train the next generation of leaders in conducting cutting-edging innovative research on cities through cross-disciplinary approaches to solve complex urban problems.

The cross-disciplinary areas we now focus are:

• Education, Employment and Labor Markets
• Migration, Inequality, and Social Inclusion
• Population, Health, and Ageing
• Regional and Urban Economic Development
• GIS and Spatial Analysis
• Smart City
• Transportation and Communication Infrastructure