The Quito Papers: towards the open city (London)

Film screening and panel discussion

Film screening and discussion hosted by Theatrum Mundi

“The Quito Papers” is a research collaboration between Theatrum Mundi, NYU and UN-Habitat, developed in the run-up to the United Nations Habitat III conference held in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016. With funding from the Kaifeng Foundation, Theatrum Mundi – based at LSE Cities and New York University – presented “The Quito Papers: towards the open city” film, directed by Dom Bagnato and Cassim Shepard, with the collaboration of filmmakers in Beijing, Karachi, Lagos, London, New York, Quito, São Paulo and Mexico City.

The film was presented in London as part of UTOPIA 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility and within LSE’s public lecture series.

In 1933, Le Corbusier and other members of the architectural modernist group CIAM, contemplated the problems facing cities before World War II. The result was a document called the Charter of Athens which proposed a radical restructuring of the city based on rationalist principles. Since then, the Charter has influenced urban development in cities across the world. Heavily critiqued for its inflexible and rigid planning doctrines, the “Quito Papers” has revisited what a present day manifesto for cities would be. Its ethos is to explore the qualities of public space and urban life, arguing for a more open, pliable and incremental approach to city-making, avoiding the prescriptive pitfalls of the original. The short film was conceived to interpret and communicate the papers’ to a wider audience of citizens and city-makers.

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Profiles

    Ricky Burdett

    Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics (LSE), and director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age project. He is a member of the Mayor of London’s Cultural Leadership Board, and was chief advisor on Architecture and Urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics and architectural advisor to the Mayor of London from 2001 to 2006. He was director of the International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2006. With Deyan Sudjic he is co-editor of The Endless City (2007) and Living in the Endless City (2011) and, with Philipp Rode Shaping Cities in an Urban Age (2018).

    Saskia Sassen

    Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and co-chairs its Committee on Global Thought. Her research and writing focuses on, immigration, global cities, the new networked technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. Her most recent book is Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press 2014). She has received multiple honours, most recently the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize for the Social Sciences.

    Richard Sennett

    Richard Sennett is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. His research interests include the relationship between urban design and urban society, urban family patterns, the urban welfare system, the history of cities and the changing nature of work. His books include The Craftsman (2008), The Culture of the New Capitalism (Yale, 2006), Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (Penguin, 2003), The Corrosion of Character (1998), Flesh and Stone (1994) and The Fall of Public Man (1977). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Society of the Arts and the Academia Europea. He is past President of the American Council on Work and the former Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Recent honours and awards include The Schocken Prize, 2011; Honorary Doctorate from Cambridge University, 2010; The Spinoza Prize, 2010; The Tessenow Prize, 2009; The Gerda Henkel Prize, 2008; The European Craft Prize, 2008; and The Hegel Prize, 2006.

    Wendy Pullan

    Wendy Pullan is Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies and Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. For ten years she was Principal Investigator for the ESRC Large Grants project 'Conflict in Cities and the Contested State’. She now directs the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research. Her recent publications include: Locating Urban Conflicts (2013) and The Struggle for Jerusalem’s Holy Places (2013). She is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Further details: www.urbanconflicts.arct.cam.ac.uk