Rekindle Urbanity

Lecture

Beomeo library, Daegu, Korea

6th Global Youth Academy Program_Daegu

26 March 2016

If we inquire about a relativism wishing that appropriate measures correspond to every type of societies – principle befitting to environmentalists and ecologists movements while often leading to loops and conceptual loopholes failing to meet practical issues – then every street must have a located urban policy. Protocol barely bearable if we consider that each communication links (streets) today is composed of residents in transition, strengthening and deconstructing communities at the whim of the economy.

Although new governmentalities enlighten us on the new sociabilities, the researchers anticipating societal change are incapable of producing more than the current environmental narrative of a Green Humanism. It is, however, the issue of Urban Planning / Anticipation that can engage from echoes of the street, in researches shaping our future spaces. Also, we wonder in what these theoretical paths along the lines of communications are to teach us about these new associations of ‘bystanders’.

The methodological exclusion of social resistances in the process of planning projects from experts issued from the modernity explains the lack of Theory/Pratice  of these approaches. The emergence of a variety of social engineerings through various forms of citizen empowerment in the countries rewriting their modernity demonstrates the obsolescence of these mechanisms of expertise.

We will approach the new regime of historicity of social resistance in urbanity matters that hatch in the world, especially in a country with dazzling transitions such as South Korea. And how today the careful listening of the alerts ventured by these underground movements in Seoul, helps to improve the environmental prospective of the country.

Citizen participation usually considered to be a positive Ecological Democracy is also a witness of the contemporary governance flaws. Analysis of consensus building processes in some new citizen arrangements in Hyojadong, Bupyeong and Gyongie line, Seoul_Korea – as well as Tohoku, Izumo and Ama island in Japan, allow us to account for the ability of the political and social ecology such as an environmental psychology tool to strengthen the Sustainable Biosphere in the heart of our post-cities.