Re-Imagining Cities:
Urban Design After the Age of Oil
An International Conference commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the University of Pennsylvania - Rockefeller Foundation Conference on Urban Design Criticism
November 6-8, 2008
Click image to link to conference website
In 1958, conversations between Jane Jacobs, directors of the Rockefeller Foundation, and the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania resulted in a conference that helped shape the new discipline of urban design. For three days in October 1958, a group of the most respected and influential architects, city planners, landscape architects, and architectural critics gathered at the University of Pennsylvania-Rockefeller Foundation CONFERENCE ON URBAN DESIGN CRITICISM to discuss the future of US cities. Together they proposed new ways to turn the controversial federal Urban Renewal program to less destructive and more humanistic ends.
Fifty years later, cities face even larger challenges. An energy crisis looms on the horizon. In the near future, global oil demand will outpace global oil supply. Only the date when world petroleum production will peak and begin to decline, and not if this will come to pass, is a matter of debate. Given the amount of such energy used in the built environment, dramatic changes in the shape of the urban landscape seem inevitable.
Regardless of when the energy crisis occurs, massive reductions in climate-changing carbon emissions are already imperative to minimize catastrophic climate change. Simply to stabilize carbon emissions at current levels, North Americans must reduce automobile travel by one-half and dramatically improve the energy performance of buildings, power generating stations, and all other carbon-emitting activities. In an era of exponential development and population growth in Asia and the Global South, the monumental task of re-imagining the design of the built environment is already a necessity. The end of the Age of Oil is upon us.
The purpose of RE-IMAGINING CITIES: URBAN DESIGN AFTER THE AGE OF OIL is to help construct a much-needed blueprint. This conference and related exhibition look back fifty years to the beginning of a new way of thinking about cities. More importantly, however, the event seeks to stimulate discussion and present projects that anticipate the future and help us re-imagine cities for the next fifty years.
Peter L. Laurence
Co-Director, Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil
Ph.D. Program in Architecture, University of Pennsylvania School of Design
Clemson University School of Architecture
