Director of City Link 2015 Congress Programme
I’m delighted to be working with the good people at Copenhagen based organisation Givrum on this year’s City Link Festival. As Director of the City Link Symposium 2015 I’ve helped to create a special event on the theme of Democratic Renewal that celebrates cities and the people and activity that shape them. We have brought together speakers who in different ways have studied, considered, altered or impacted the urban environment.
Our one day symposium will be held on Friday 25th September, commencing at Summerhall for a morning of talks, and an afternoon of workshops in various locations across the city.
The morning programme will feature speakers from Scotland, Denmark, the US, Germany and the Netherlands. Christoph Lindner, Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where he writes about cities, visual culture, and globalization, will present Retro-Walking New York: Slow Urbanism. He uses New York City's High Line elevated park as a case study to explore how slowness - as both an aesthetic experience and a spatial practice - is increasingly being used to enable the neoliberal development of the global city.
Signe Brink Pedersen, Denmark, will bring her experiences of curating Dream City at Roskilde Festival to Edinburgh. Signe will present how temporary art and architecture might be used to catalyse development with playful approaches in urban contexts.
Other speakers include US-based artist and urban interventionist Jason Roberts, Copenhagen based Architect and urban designer Kristoffer Kamp Theisen, creative producer and Director of Creative Edinburgh Janine Matheson and Director of Festivals Edinburgh Faith Liddell.
Those attending the symposium can also participate in afternoon site visits around Edinburgh: City ‘hacktivist’ Jason Roberts will join Akiko Kobiyashi on the Union Canal for a hands-on workshop on DIY Urbanism; LeithLate will give a tour of local Leith murals and street art; Tech hub CodeBase will host a digital mapping workshop led by Edinburgh College of Art’s Chris Speed using smartphone technology to map the ‘time of the city’ and Hamburg based activist and artist Till Haupt will give an insight in to his work in grassroots urban activism and politics.
City Link connects cultural communities across Europe to meet and share ideas on how we can make fairer and more democratic cities – knowledge sharing on the international fluxes of democratic urban development. Each year City Link connects two new cities together, and celebrates this connection in a festival. Through the City Link initiative, we aim to promote international collaboration and connect cultural communities beyond the institutional frameworks, enabling anyone to exchange ideas, collaborate and inform how their city could develop in a fair and democratic way.
