(Critical) Cosmopolitan Urbanism Continued: Constructing an atlas for the pluralist design of the European environment.

Since the first passionate plea for cultivating the project of a cosmopolitan urbanism, the empirical reality of multi-cultural cities has triggerred numerous reflections on how to cater for a diversity of urban users, raising practical questions on how to manage productive coexistence in shared spaces. Relatedly, this research considers cosmopolitanism as a fundamental trait of European city-formation and, in its more critical sense, as a tool to emphasise a transformative concept of culture based on collective learning. The underlying assumption is that past processes of socio-spatial (trans)formation, in light of the encounter with alterity, contain learning potential for pursuing the project of inter-cultural planning in Europe. The project therefore documents actual practices of critical cosmopolitanism with a focus on archetypical spaces that coincide with cosmpolitan standards at certain moments in history. Considering space as an active contributor to inter-cultural interactions, the outcome will be both interpretative and projective. Mappings will rely on integrative and inter-disciplinary devices such as atlases and micro-narratives, contributing to on-going interrogations on how to design plural cities.

Keywords:Cosmopolitan Urbanism, atlas, pluralist design, Europe

Disciplines:Construction engineering, Earthquake engineering, Geotechnical and environmental engineering, Water engineering, Wind engineering