REGIONAL WORKSHOP ON URBAN MUTATIONS

Neighborhoods: the return or the end

The building of the neighborhood challenged by changes and urban policies

Istanbul and Tehran neighborhoods compared to the capitals and cities of the region

2013 May 2, 3 / Istanbul

While in Tehran the reference to the neighborhood and the use of the term is spreading and becoming a visible and assertive concern of the public policies, it appears in Istanbul in the vocabulary and urban imaginary but without actually representing a relevant framework for the city councillors who even threat to eradicate it. This workshop will review the purpose and the meaning of the neighborhood as a framework of thinking and action, as a substantive and symbolic reference but also as a place of memory in the broader context of urban transformations.

The tendency to oppose the neighborhood, as a full and close reality, to the town, considered too large and poorly understood, is today called into question. The neighborhood never gives itself as a whole. It has as many gaps and undefined areas as the city. In a framework of metropolisation, the neighborhood can also become synonymous of strength, relate to the village and become a "state of mind" conveyed in the television series (Louis Wirth).

The urban renovation projects ongoing in both cities, lead to a fast disappearance of the social fabric, heritage and local identities that were built over the years, a phenomenon that seems contradictory in Tehran, with the will of the local community to strengthen the local urban management. In Istanbul, this phenomenon is accompanied by a museification and a social engineering agenda, through the creation of Ottomans neighborhoods.

The notion of neighborhood is therefore unfolding at the crossroad of socio-spatial constructions, political and chronological, as well as mental representations and a range of diversified uses. Between dimensional instability and existential uncertainty (Piolle), there will be an attempt to understand the neighborhood as a "socio-spatial mediation" between the unknown and the known, the inside and the outside, the agreement and disagreement between self and other (Di Meo). The neighborhood will therefore be considered as the most effective scale of observation to analyze the spatial distribution of social substances (Michel Lussault).

This symposium involves a transdisciplinary as well as transperiodical character. Since "the city builds itself on the city", that is to say that a long term duration is essential to the settlement of populations and the governances on urban fabric, we will have to consider the old neighborhoods and their reconstruction as well as the creation of new neighborhoods beyond the build-up area of the city. These phenomena are a known reality for all the cities that will be discussed in this workshop, first of all Istanbul and Tehran but also Alexandria, Cairo, Athens and Beirut. We’ll give "free time" to take out the neighborhood of its isolation –on a spatial, temporal, political and epistemological scale.

With the support of laboratoire Mosaïques Paris-Ouest University and Institut Français