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About the seminar 

The international seminar project entitled CULTURAL CITIES: Creativity and Social Inclusion in Osaka and Copenhagen is a forum for scholars as well as urban planners, architects and artists to investigate how Creativity and Social Inclusion in urban centres may develop on a global scale in the future. The project will consist of exclusive excurssions around Copenhagen on February 9 (limited number of participants), as well as a two-day public seminar with academic and project related presentations at the University of Copenhagen on February 10-11. The two-day public seminar is open for all and free of charge - just show up!

MAIN TOPIC: CULTURAL PLANNING AND SOCIAL INCLUSION

The seminar will address issues of artistic and creative practices within city planning and local communities in Osaka and Copenhagen. Such approach opens to broader fields of urbanity in relation to governance, citizenship, and identities, including aspects of creative industries, popular culture, and aesthetic values.

Central to the discussion will be concerns about the social dimension in city planning as well as social reactions to and appropriations of urban redevelopment. There are two key questions we wish to highlight in presentations and discussions:

• How is the diversity of urban life facilitated through urban planning?
• How does practises of cultural creativity manifest itself in the city?

Particular attention will be given to artistic or cultural projects mediating between the planed and the improvised city - between built form and urban mobility. In what ways does such projects, in the form of planed spaces, events, critical interventions or collaborative projects, lend visibility to minor cultures and practises while at the same time enhancing urban or local character? And how might the addition to urban environments of sensorial qualities such as light, sound, colours etc. add to the development of a socially inclusive, safe, lively, active urban culture?

The aim of the seminar event is to investigate actual, site-specific projects in Osaka and Copenhagen and from this attempt to draw broader theoretical conclusions regarding models for cultural planning and social inclusion in cities for the future. By focusing on the similarities and differences between cities such as Osaka and Copenhagen, it may be possible to detect patterns related to broader models of Asian and Scandinavian urban planning, their histories, cultures and social contexts.