Nog tot 9 december 2012 loopt in Sint-Lucas Gent en Brussel een tentoonstelling rond Streetscape Territories, een internationaal onderzoeksproject binnen LUCA School of Arts.
Lees verder in het Engels:
Streetscape Territories is the name given to an international research project that deals with the territorial organization of urban projects, studied as part of different cultures and defined by multiple social networks.
Etymologically, streetscapes refer to systems of streets. Therefore, streetscape territories allude to the existence and importance of territorial systems as related to the street. Examples of these territorial systems could be a set of properties, of which the exterior boundaries are constantly questioned and tested by its neighbors, or a house or storefront that exists as part of a shared portico in a street. One might consider either a courtyard or passage commonly used by a restricted group of neighbors in a residential area, or even a square, as part of a succession or set of collective spaces within a city. Independent from the categories of scale or function, streetscapes are defined by and dependent upon systems of adjacent, overlapped, and integrated territories, controlled by multiple agents. Territoriality, permeability, and proximity have indeed become the real protagonists of urban growth or transformation. Therefore, the contemporary discourse on streetscapes no longer focuses on the aesthetics of a perfect set design. Neither does the quality of a streetscape depend on the size of the constituent building lots nor the dimensions of its buildings. The built environment, together with its constituent elements and related dimensions, is increasingly defined by access control and its inherent social networks.
As explored in the 1960s as a reaction to modern planning recipes, streetscapes can be seen as configurations—simple or complex—with physical, visual, and territorial factors defining a morphological and functional display of urban cues that are coded and decoded according to the present socio-cultural framework of a neighborhood. This model, however, needs to be updated according to new spatial and social phenomena. Streetscape Territories wants to take this particular challenge as a starting point.