General Framework for the Current Research

In discussions during 2010 and 2011 leading up to the definition of the terms of reference of upcoming papers, participants from New York, Bangkok and Buenos Aires had numerous observations about the program. Some of these observations, presented below, help to frame future works:

•    It was agreed we could work on two or three common questions in each team, and once we have detected phenomena, we could include some case studies.

•    We mainly discussed about the areas of convergence between the design and social science fields. During the debate, the center of attention remained on the city as a common territory.

•     The issue of inclusion/exclusion seemed to represent the major challenges for both disciplines.

A series of questions were raised including:

•    What do inclusion and exclusion mean in the 21st century? What does popular habitat in these productive conditions today mean?

•    What are the new models of family? Does the city adapt to the way people's lives are organized? And in any case, what adapts to what? The city to society? Or vice versa?

•    What is the inertia of the city? How possible is to change it? Can we plan a defined city as ours?

•    What would be the goals of design? What would be the spaces associated with these goals? What would be the aspirations of cities? How does society regulate the state of things?

•    How does the city contain or not the problems it generates? How does the city discriminate?

On this last series of questions, some possible answers were generated:

•    "Society and the city are built in parallel; the habitat determines also the practices.”

•    "Desires don’t preexist to constructions, constructions also prefigure them. Architecture is not only the response to a series of requirements, they can reformulate it.”

•    "Classic forms of architecture used to think about finished and defined objects. It has changed once it included social issues.”

•    "The idea of planning as something unchanging is not possible. This does not mean that a planning fails because something has not been thought. Planning is useful to see the differences with what has been thought. I can’t measure the degrees of deviation if I don't have references.”

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