Creative Adjacencies

3th. International Alfa ADU2020 conference

new challenges for Architecture, Design and Urbanism for updating, modernising and synchronizing the university curricula

 3-6 June 2014, Ghent, Belgium.

The third ALFA ADU2020 conference will be held in 2014 in Ghent in the KU Leuven, Faculty of architecture, campus Sint-Lucas Ghent.

The conference will focus on creative adjacencies: unexpected phenomena of emergent liaisons, on urban contrasts and conflicts, on unusual professional collaborations or creative joined forces as the generator of new possibilities, new strategies in a dynamic contemporary environment.

Related to the increasing complexity of the environment we inhabit, new answers are needed and indeed provided to respond to the present challenges and potentials. Contrary to the past planning and design models, alternative approaches emerge in the field of Architecture, Design and Urbanism. More than ever, research and design approaches seem surprisingly provocative, rather unexpected or even edgy: stereotype interventions based on problem solving and blueprint thinking are avoided in many new practices of design and research. New ways of appropriating space, designing objects, defining interior spaces or restructuring urban areas seem to look for alternative and creative solutions, in many cases based on what is already there, ie on existing adjacencies. Unplanned hybridism, spontaneous use, ambiguous appropriation of space, unexpected or weird combinations of activities, contrasting elements or alternative forms of delimiting and using space seem to occur increasingly, at different scales and on a global scale. 

Conference themes will engage in different and divers approaches in the new curricula-develoment of Architecture, Design and Urbanism. The sessions will address a range of research, design and educational reflections and strategies on creative solutions for complex situations.

Submission abstracts (500 words) can be done online until the 1st of February 2014

Detailed information can be found at https://creativeadjacencies.com and in the brief in the attachment.