City Makers: A New Paradigm for Urbanism

Abstract

Looking at the emblematic photography by Mau- ro Masera of 1960 that sets the freshly produced Sanluca chair on stage in the arcades of San Luca in Bologna, we experience a flash-back to the inventiveness and energy of the Italian design in the 1960ies. The approach of City Makers responds to a so- cial, economic and cultural move towards re-es- tablishing materiality in the age of digitalisation. With the project City Makers we develop two—as 9 will be shown—strongly interlinked lines of re- search: firsthand, the question of place and space as stage and source of the new creative and pro- ductive urban paradigm of making. And secondly, the question of the influence of a maker paradigm to the concepts and ways to work on the positive transformation of city and territory.