Meeting diversity

• Burhan Sönmez

The novelist and president of PEN International highlights the cosmopolitan spirit of Istanbul and recalls that Gustave Flaubert was fascinated by the diversity of languages he heard in its streets.

This is our house, if houses can be owned

Das ist unser Haus! | Burkhard Grießenauer, Daniel Kunle, and Holger Lauinger | SEELAND Medienkooperative E.D. | Germany, 2017 | 64 min. | German

• Martín Garber Salzberg

Members of the Mietshäuser Syndikat (Union of Rented Housing) describe the model of collective appropriation of space and present projects of widely varying approaches and settings of housing.

"Tolerance for difference is learned in cities"

• Rahel Jaeggi

The German philosopher speaks of public spaces that make it possible for us to work out who we are through interaction with strangers. At the same time, public spaces are a precondition for collective democratic action.

Prize Advisory Committee
Meeting in Barcelona

On 4 and 5 March the first meeting of the Advisory Committee of the European Prize for Urban Public Space was held at the CCCB. The Board for this year’s award consists of ten European institutions working in the domains of architecture and urban planning.

Architects have not always gone along with the powerful

The Killing of Muhammad Gulzar | Forensic Architecture | United Kingdom, 2020 | 16' | English

• Martín Garber Salzberg

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Its multidisciplinary team works together to reconstruct and document cases of abuse for purposes of reporting them in legal and political forums.

“A good urban public space performs its functional role while also expressing what is public”

• José Maria Ezquiaga

An architect and sociologist with a long career concerned with cities, he considers several key aspects of urban transformation and reviews examples of good urban public space practices around the world.