Category: All articles

If an active citizenship needs places to unfold where a sense of neighbourhood, belonging and identity can be developed, the majority of recent cities do not meet this criterion. If active citizenship is a premise for free citizens and hence for democracy, where is such an active citizenship possible today? If not confined to protests?

How Housing Pressures Erase Cultural Heritage, Identity, and Citizenship – The Chandigarh Story

The proliferation of gated communities and residential compounds has reshaped urban development across diverse contexts, from rapidly growing cities in Asia to more established environments. While these enclaves respond to legitimate demands for safety, order, and quality of life, their cumulative impact on the city remains underexamined. This paper argues that compound-based urbanism produces fragmentation,…

What is being presented in this essay is a view into the relationship between loss of identity and collective consciousness within society/community and the Self. This is paralleled with the adaptions relative to the new internet/social media outer world and the possible journey to individual and societal nihilism, as is discussed from the point of…

Through and with this creative-relational inquiry and commentary I explore how we can stay with the trouble of loneliness and respond to it through encounters with community gardens. Community gardens are a growing third place within Western societies that offer affective environments, which support participants’ wellbeing, belonging and interconnectivity, as well as transformational encounters, which…

This essay reconsiders urban deterioration not simply as failure, loss, or civic abandonment, but as a critical category through which the moral authority of preservation, repair, and revitalization can be questioned.

Reclaiming the multiplicity of what a city means, this article works with the palimpsest archetype through the lens of complex thinking to explore how memory shapes reality, rather than merely recalling it. The methodology, based on a literature review, first lays the foundations for how the palimpsest archetype develops in the city, both literally and…

The historical idea of the city in Western culture has long been closely linked to the concept of citizenship. From the Greek polis to the modern European city, urban space was understood as a place where citizens could meet, interact, and participate in the shaping of collective life. Streets, markets, squares, and neighborhoods formed the…

In my photographic work, I search for the cracks in the polished image of the modern city. We all sense it: city centers are becoming unaffordable, and luxurious spaces are reserved for a small elite. With my series La Grande Bouffe, however, I did not want to produce a theoretical treatise, but rather to tell…

Katerina Belkina’s work ‘For All Mankind’ – an outside view of community

According to a Western cultural heritage, where the idea of free citizenship and democracy originated, citizenship, place, and the city belong together. The idea of free citizenship and democracy is reflected in the understanding of the human being as a zoon politikon, literally translated an animal who lives in the polis, the city. It is…

Questions regarding place, the individual, and community in 21st century cities are encouraging new research as a result of the transformation of daily life around a barrage of data, entertainment, hyper communication, instant consumer satisfaction and more all constantly available at our side in our pocket or bag we carry. We compulsively interact with this…

By analyzing the way architecture is taught and practiced, we can clearly see that we are currently in a situation similar to that denounced by Viollet-Le-Duc in the middle of the Beaux-Arts period… something that, as history has taught us, cannot lead to anything good

This paper critically discusses a common liberal relationship between civil society and civility. It highlights how liberal theory constructs a theory of civil society which, at the same time, suggests that one can pursue certain democratic ideals as long as they remain ‘civilised’. The paper shows how these liberal ideals have in practice constrained the…

Much has been written about successful communities and why certain places are “destinations” and others are not. Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” emphasizes in poetic prose that the city is a constantly evolving place – simultaneously both being constructed and decaying, aspirational and fleeting. Through this we come to realize: do we ever really know what…