23 Oct 2010

Urbania 4 magazine: city projects in debate, Sao Paulo

Outline for new cultures: city projects in debate is the first activity of the editorial project by Urbania 4 magazine.

Many cities grow and are transformed without a second thought for a project. However, many were the opportunities in which individuals and collectives have studied the possibility of projecting new cities, models for urban space committed to social and cultural models. As Urbânia 4 magazine gathers (and confronts) such projects, it seeks to investigate where utopias are located today, so as to stimulate the collective building of other imaginaries. One aims to animate a reflection about what the cities in which we live could have been and, fundamentally, on what they could become.

Each issue of Urbania magazine features a different format. In this fourth issue, it takes the form of a website, inaugurating a more collaborative publication process, strengthening a project logic, just like the cities studied - open to constant reformulation. The urbania4.org website's database is organized in three sections, borrowing from the structure of Constant Nieuwenhuijs' manuscript, New Babylon - Outline for a culture 1963-65, where the author presented the project for the city of New Babylon in three ways: 'model of society and city' (texts), 'atlas' (images - models, drawings) and 'radical cultural critique' (the culture imagined by Constant as a counterpoint to the existing models for culture).

The cities of Brasilia, Havana, Sao Paulo, Luanda, New Babylon and the Ireno Alves dos Santos/Vila Barrageira Settlement were selected as subjects for the presencial debates. For each of these discussions, Urbânia 4 magazine's editors - Graziela Kunsch and Paulo Miyada, also curators of this project - chose one or more debaters, plus one editorial theme led by editors/collectives from an independent art and architecture magazine. This editorial editor/collective will act as mediators and, in some cases, will propose a new debate for a given situation, resorting to a repertoire of collaborators of the magazine itself and/or creating a critical confrontation. This dynamics aims to decentralise and democratise the process for choosing the discussions' participants, rendering possible to the debates to take unexpected/unimagined turns, valuing the role played by independent magazines in the formation of a radical cultural critique. In order to lend density to the presencial debates and workshops, a series of special activities are scheduled.

Live streaming: www.emm.usp.br/vivo-eca.asx

This project won the public selection of presencial debates of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture's Cultura e Pensamento Programme 2009/2010. The research for Urbania 4 was developed with a grant from the 47th Salao de Artes Plasticas de Pernambuco (Fundarpe).