IDENTITY IN PLACE

Reconnecting Built Form with Societal Diversity

This theme explores how architecture and urban planning can support the diverse identity of present-day cities.

Concept

IDENTITY IN PLACE explores how architecture and urban planning can support the diverse identity of present-day cities. Across the earth, places have evolved to be remarkably distinct from each other, even when their geography and climate are similar. Culture is the manmade factor that expresses this difference, most tangibly in the built environment. Culture requires supporting spaces expressing shared identity and heritage – be these daily activities or significant events – to foster societal cohesion.

Despite the importance of culture in determining how all places look and are experienced, it tends not to be a critical tool in urban design and planning. This is lost potential, especially in the present-day era of rapid urbanisation and movement, when there is often little time to grow an identity through shared heritage, as entire cities can emerge in just a few years, urban dwellers increasingly live and work between multiple cities and large portions of societies migrate to distant and culturally different places, escaping environmental, political or economic disasters that also destroy cherished urban fabrics.

How can architecture and urban planning express the diverse identity of present-day cities? Can urban practice broaden and revise the spectrum of housing, workspace, public and open space typologies in line with how societies need and use space today? Are other concepts required to illuminate the connections between people and where and how they live? How should the reconstruction of lost built fabric and the identification of heritage be approached?