Open call: Back to Human Scale | International Conference

Início em 01/07/2022 até 15/07/2022

Categorias: 07 julho 2022

Open call: Back to Human Scale | International Conference | Lisbon 24-25 November 2022

The current context in which we live emphasises crises of climate change and health pandemic and focuses attention on ecological systems at a planetary scale. However, the scale of the living spaces of our daily life is less and less explored, or at least reduced to quantitative figures serving as a support for approaches, reasoning, or political and economic agendas.

This meeting propose that consideration of the human scale is relevant when thinking ecologically and will allow inclusion of qualitative considerations as well as quantitative ones in a more comprehensive than apprehensive way.

The challenge of this meeting is therefore to re-introduce the human scale at the core of our analyses and strategies, when ‘thinking ecologically’ about the cities of tomorrow.

The current situation of stress that has emerged from the world health crisis has led to sharp social distances which is entirely against the grain to all the notions of proxemics that have so far been discussed since E.T. Hall. It reduced all that social richness distances to a single standard sanitary one. In the other hand, mediated sociability, that technological curiosity highly valued by online game players which virtualizes our social distance, is becoming a new standard practice, both in work and leisure situations, as a means to relate to others. The ‘human scale’ urgently needs re-visiting and deserves, in our view, to be explored with the same precision as all the themes that relate to the human milieu. One suggests here to set this as our collective challenge, during this meeting.

Indeed, isn’t it in the home that issues such as comfort, home-economics, rational thinking, and our perception of space all merge into one terrain for exploration and expression, which later can help us to make sense of all encompassing scales?

Isn’t it also from our very home that issues of ‘sensitive space’ and ‘in-situ perception’, of actions undertaken by the inhabitant, later spread into the urban sphere and impact even further? Isn’t it at his/her human scale that the inhabitant is fully ‘acting’ and responsible? His/her transformative action in the inhabited milieu becomes the most visible and sensitive manifestation of his/her being because of its immediate nature.

Transformations at higher eco-systemic levels might often take place at a slower pace than within our societies and hence affect our perception of change, disturbing our sense of urgency. This meeting invites us to (re-) think about how to improve the natural and social habitats and the relationship to the immediate surroundings. It is suggested to do this by questioning how one could re-explore the built environment and ensure that it creates strong bridges with the natural environment even if the goal is to isolate us from it.

How to rethink the inhabited environment, our relationship to the immediate environment, how to re-examine the built space today which interfaces, isolates us and serves as an instrument of relationship to the urban or natural environment? how is architectural and urban production at the same time an action of construction on a human scale and of destruction on a planetary scale?

Are welcome all works and thoughts on architecture, atmospheres, landscapes, and the territory, which explore the responsible relationship between our built environment and natural habitats, from a ‘human scale’ perspective. This meeting is an international event and perspectives from various contexts are highly valued.

About the Meeting

Back to Human Scale is organized by Universidade Lusófona

Department of Architecture and Urban Planning

ARQ.ID |Arquitetura, Investigação e Desenvolvimento, with the collaboration of,
CeiED | Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Education and Development, by Urban Planning team
Faculty of Engineering