Urban Imaginaires: Comparative perspectives, experiments and exchanges between the metropolises of Lyon/Saint-Étienne and São Paulo

• Grant number: 20/06258-3
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: December 01, 2020
• End date: July 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning
• Agreement: Université de Lyon (UDL)
• Principal Investigator: Artur Simões Rozestraten
• Grantee: Artur Simões Rozestraten
• Principal researcher abroad: Michel Rautenberg
• Institution abroad: Université Jean Monnet (UJM), France
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Aline Silva Santos ; Ana Carolina Carmona Ribeiro ; Arthur Simões Caetano Cabral ; Catharina Pinheiro Cordeiro dos Santos Lima ; Diogo Augusto Mondini Pereira ; Eduardo Paschoal de Sousa ; Gabriel Mazzola Poli de Figueiredo ; Gabriela Barzaghi de Laurentiis ; Juliana Quartim Barbosa Gotilla ; Luciano Gutierres Pessoa ; Luiz Arthur Leitão Vieira ; Paula Martins Vicente ; Rafael Pollastrini Murolo ; Rodrigo Luiz Minot Gutierrez ; Rogério de Almeida ; Ruth Cuiá Troncarelli ; Tatiana Francischini Brandão dos Reis ; Vania Bartalini ; Vladimir Bartalini

Abstract

This research aims to expand knowledge on urban imaginaires considering a cross-referenced and comparative perspective on projects, cases, experiments and exploratory initiatives carried out both in Lyon/Saint-Étienne, France, and in São Paulo, Brazil. To do so this joint research will promote deep and advanced studies on a transdisciplinary scientific field of convergence between architecture and urbanism, visual arts, anthropology, sociology, cultural geography, philosophy, technology and humanities. By doing so, this research project aims to contribute to the deepening of contemporary studies on urban imaginaires as meaningful and symbolic profusions of images produced by the imagination as deformations, as openings and escapes from a supposed perceptual evidence of urban reality. Considering that imagination is neither a rare nor an special state of mind, but rather human existence itself, this conceptual approach deals with the continuous mobility of urban images that concerns: the symbolic nature of images which is ambiguous - being form and form potential simultaneously - and, consequently, an hybridization source as well; the need to combine the "visible" and the "reading", mixing them to create a narrative; the poetic production, also understood as construction or cosmogony of assortments of images or imaginaires; the organization of significant sets of visible images - imageries - metaphorically referred to as constellations, fluvial network, galaxy or even, polis; the disorganization, reorganization, survival, breach and transformation of imaginaires. This research will be dedicated to a critical approach to the urban imaginaires by means of their imageries or sensible bases as visible images, such as iconographies, cartographies, photographies, drawings, written and spoken narratives, 3D models, and all kind of multisensory urban representations which contribute to establishing the city and its surroundings as social imaginaires, both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, objective and subjective, present or absent on contemporary urban relations. Such an approach leads to a méta-dimension that regards the efforts to analyze and to understand the actual discourses, narratives, interpretations, hermeneutics, theories about such sets of images, imageries and their flow as imaginaires. This méta-condition can also be design oriented towards an experimental field and an architecture and urbanism design development. (AU)