In September 2024, the University “Ss. Cyril and Methodius” in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia, will host the interdisciplinary conference “City Streets 6” with the theme “Architecture as Infrastructure – Toward Sustainable, Inclusive and Beautiful City Streets.” The conference aims to highlight architecture’s role in creating additional values, meaning, and community-based quality in city streets beyond material and communal infrastructure. It invites researchers, scholars, architects, urban designers, planners, artists, and policymakers to share knowledge and experiences in making city streets more inclusive, just, sustainable, and beautiful.
Track 1: “Streets as Infrastructure for Sympatry,” chaired by Jorge Mejía Hernández and Slobodan Velevski, invites contributors to scrutinize current calls for inclusivity and diversity in the built environment through the perspective of sympatry. The goal is to assess, based on tangible evidence, the practical benefits (or lack thereof) of human diversity in the creation and use of streets. Building upon Anderson’s insights into streets as spaces where reciprocal interactions between users and their environments create a unique urban ecology, the track aims to unveil distinct relational principles at play within the socio-physical environment of actual streetscapes. Potential contributions may include case studies exploring instances where the coexistence of different ‘species’ of human individuals correlates with the quality of a specific built environment. Additionally, analyses could delve into how a broad spectrum of interests and capabilities, observable in diverse individuals, influences their utilization and provision of resources in specific city areas. The track also welcomes theoretical reflections on expansive approaches to diversity, moving beyond dialectic, binary, or dichotomous modes of interpretation.
Keywords: Sympatry, Human Diversity, Resource Utilization, Streets as Infrastructure
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