Abolish the nation - for a parliament of cities From public places to world citizenship

by Vera Baur-Kockot & Ruedi Baur

Workshop description:

Lecture and 2 days workshop for designers, urbanists and activists from all fields.

In the period of deregulated capitalism and reinvigorated nationalisms, where eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity, where money and goods can freely circulate in contrast to access-controlled human beeings, we have to develop new concepts of sharing the same world in crisis. Today, 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050. www.unicef.org/sowc2012/urbanmap/#

Faced with these realities, the cities, the metropolis, the communities must come together, as nodes of networks, autonomous in exceeding the filters imposed by the nation-states, inclusive and open to the Tout-Monde/Whole World, which already corresponds to our urban realities.

In this sense the public places constitute the real and symbolic relations between the situated and the passage between the private and the common, the mobil and the immobile, the gathering and the individual, here and elsewhere.

This workshop is best suited for designers, urbanists and activists from all fields.

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