50th World Congress Geneva
Geneva, 10-12 September 2006 - 50th World Congress: “Urban Life, Boundaries and Transformations”
At the same time as cities are the engines of globalisation, they are themselves being profoundly altered by it. So many changes, such as the emergence of new urban territories, are challenging political institutions to restructure to prevent the emergence of new urban territories with no system of governance.
Geneva, the second largest city of Switzerland, is encircled by its national border with France. In fact the borders of the canton share 103 km with France and only 4,5km with Switzerland! Despite their territorial and historical evolution, this city is quite an interesting example to approach by the theme of 'Boundaries & Transformations'. 
With 325 participants from 43 countries, the 50th World Congress discussed the social and temporal dimension of planning and its spatial and institutional components.
As part of this event, the international film and video competition on the built environment was organized for the 15th time. Amongst the 40 entries related to the theme “Urban Life and Boundaries”, the winner of the first prize was Joachim Lepastier from France with “Paris Cerné”.
With introductions made by Xiangming Chen(USA); Claude Raffestin(Switzerland) and Pierre-Alain Rumley(Switzerland) the “boundary” theme was divided into 3 perspectives:
- “Networks”
- “Societies”
- “Powers” with the following speakers: Paola Vigano, Trudi Bunting; John Abbot, Jean-Piérre Guingané; Liliane Barakat and Etienne Blanc.
Jacques Levy, the General Rapporteur, reflected on the role of our profession and our mission to work with paradoxes (the city as content/the city as container; isotropy/polarization; territories/networks; bottom-up approach/top-down approach; etc.), to manage them so that “we get them moving, evolving”.
Jacques mentioned that behind the technical analysis present in congresses, big philosophical issues about the city and the urban context have always been clearly present: “This humility is not surprising: urban planners are men and women whose humility is a structural component of their character. They do not believe that their work should be seen as "masterpieces" because they know that the artist is the city itself; in other words, and in the end, all the inhabitants of the city in so far as they make something together.”The French term “urbanité” (urbanity/urbanness) as a word that altogether is made by “the density and diversity that make up the city has, as immediate corollaries, social cohesion, functional heterogeneity, exposure to openness, the public space and its civilities, the visibility of society for itself and cosmopolitanism”, and it shows that “when we work on the city, we come into contact, in a single movement, with material, immaterial and ideate issues.”Apart from the plenary sessions, different study visits allowed the participants to discover the several borders of Geneva: Spatial, Social, Institutional …
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Last Updated @ Thursday, 06 March 2008