Workshop of GSG and Prof. Jorge Lizardi Pollock, University of Puerto Rico
20th of june 2009, georg simmel center of metropolitan studies, berlin
Utopias of modernism between Latin America and Eastern Europe: How do they look and what has become of them? In the framework of the GSZ workshop “Spaces and Ideas” on June 20th, different urban utopias got revisited and compared. Prof. Jorge Lizardi-Pollock, an architectural historian of the university of Puerto Rico, focuses on the development of city renewal from the 1930s to the 1960s in Latin America, especially in Mexico and the Caribbean. The town planner Florian Koch (University of Applied Sciences, Erfurt) describes the archetypical construction of the “socialist city” and shows the realities of socialist urban development by looking at assorted Eastern European cities. In the last lecture Joanna Kusiak (University of Warsaw, Philosophy, Sociology) analyses the specific condition of South-East European urban development as a result of the immediate availability of the city for dictatorships. The workshop was moderated by Martin Schwegmann, Architect and Urban Researcher.
