Urban Eidos

Our second edition Polis and Democracy – the idea of the city for free citizens is about the very idea of democracy and the kind of citizenship aligned to it. Being aware that this is a rather encompassing theme in this issue, we want to throw just some initial highlights on it.

This essay focuses instead on theoretical debates within the sociological tradition, with a view to ascertaining what a viable “realistic” account of “everyday” utopia might consist of, but here chiefly in the urban context which this tradition chiefly addresses. Two major themes are examined here: the role of the city in these debates; and the…

Will the technical, socio-economic and political landscape bring a complete disruption of life as we know it today, or will it help mankind adapt to a better way of living, and a democratic lifestyle based on the Greek words ‘Demos‘ meaning people and ‘Kratos‘ meaning power, governing which depends on the will of the people?

Taken from its Greek origin, an eidos is an image. It is a very old word, deeply embedded in our culture. From its Indo-European root, it means “seeing”, “to see”, is related to “knowing” and stands for a consistent form, appearance, gestalt, and the very nature of what is seen as a vivid fact. Eidos…

Walter Benjamin told us about what art had lost in the course of its reproducibility. In this article I want to go into more detail about the characteristics that art had to make use of in order to preserve its balance and eventually become what we know it as today.

Urban Eidos: A New Open Access Journal by the Ideal Spaces Foundation

In an often quoted passage from his famous Epigrams the Roman poet Martial described in the first century A.D. the urban surroundings of his flat on the third floor of a narrow labyrinth of streets and houses in Rome.1 He dreamed of a nearby little square named At the pear tree as his own. Thus…

Inclusion is essentially about building communities. If design is to be considered a tool for creating inclusion, architecture is a specific form of design. The aim is to design a space for the community in question, a space as a place for the members of that community.

Art installations that engage in a dialogical relationship with their surrounding environment, transcending the confines of an isolated existence, demand a nuanced articulation of the dynamic interplay among the artwork, the spatial context, and the observer. The following report endeavors to delineate and investigate the central elements of reception and the aesthetic of production pivotal…