Mer 19 Feb
Seminari e Convegni

Pedestrianship: Cities For (Some) People

Pedestrianship: Cities For (Some) People will be the final lecture of the DASP doctoral course "Design with/for non-humans" organized by Sofia Nannini.
In this seminar, special guest Maroš Krivý from the Estonian Academy of Arts will explore the role of pedestrians in urban spaces, examining the intersections between urban planning, social justice, and neoliberal restructuring.

In Human Scale, a 2012 documentary celebrating the work of the influential architect and urban consultant Jan Gehl, the main protagonist argues that “we know much more about the good habitat for mountain gorillas or Siberian tigers than we know about the good urban habitat for Homo sapiens". If urbanism lags far behind ecology, the Danish champion of “cities for people” suggests, it is because architects haven’t fully grasped that humans are essentially upright walking mammals.
Focusing on Jan and his wife Ingrid Gehl’s 1965 study trip in Italy and Greece, this talk traces how the pedestrian or public space user emerged as a key protagonist in the urban arena, along with methods for observing and operationalizing their behavior. The concept of “pedestrianship” reveals a tension between ahistorical conceptions of human behaviour and an urban planning agenda indifferent to political rights associated with citizenship.
Gehl’s rise as an urban consultant guru came on the heels of global neoliberal restructuring, marked by the founding of Jan Gehl Architects in 2000 and the complicity of the “cities for people” agenda with gentrification and criminalization of public space.

Speaker: Maroš Krivý, Estonian Academy of Arts

Biography
Maroš Krivý is an urban studies scholar with an interest in power, design, and neoliberal urbanism. He is Professor of Urban Studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, with previous appointments as Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and Research Associate at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.
His work has been published in journals such as International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Antipode, Environment and Planning D, and Planning Theory, as well as in numerous collections, including Neoliberalism on the Ground (University of Pittsburgh, 2020), The Botanical City (jovis, 2020), and Urbanizing Suburbia (jovis, 2023).
His ongoing research examines the marginalisation of social justice perspectives in urbanism.