The Churches and the City | DEADLINE EXTENDED

#CallForAbstract

The Churches and the City| in_bo vol. 16, no. 8

Promoters DA - Dipartimento di Architettura, Università di Bologna

Edited by Luigi Bartolomei, Federica Fuligni, Gianluca Buoncore

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INTRO

In the first two decades of the 21st century, an average of ten parish complexes per year were built or implemented in Italy. This is a production that may appear to run counter to the findings, confirmed by a multitude of observers, of a reduction in religious practice in Italy. Churches, however, follow population dynamics, and while many remain memories of migrated communities, new houses of worship arise where a new population thickening manifests itself.

This lively planning and building activity generated debates on the form of churches, their architectural language, and liturgical layout. Peripheral, if not absent, is the discussion on the spatial model of parish complexes, their origin and conception, their functional and volumetric programme, their role and significance in the city about the forms and articulation with which they manifest themselves, the traditions of particular churches, and the different landscapes.

In the silence of critical thinking, most of the new buildings tend to reiterate a consolidated model in an articulation of full and empty spaces with a high public permeability: a church, a hall, meeting and training spaces, a rectory house and a churchyard, variously aggregated in a citadel of liturgy and services, sized according to the housing density of the surrounding area.

With the parish complexes, a recognizable territorial infrastructure was thus designed that was a rule for the reconfiguration of the peninsula’s settlement pattern, in the south as in the north, in the cities as in the smaller centres. Everywhere the new neighbourhoods resulted as isomorphic fabrics, arising from the juxtaposition of homologous cells, with the parish configuring a nucleus, to recreate everywhere the typical structure of historic centres.

From those years, however, is the maturation of the parish complex model as it is still conceived nowadays. The urban role, the experimentation of new ways of liturgical participation, and the expressive and technical possibilities that the new building materials (reinforced concrete in the lead) could guarantee for the design of large and welcoming spaces,certainly contributed to the determination of its image. Intrinsic to this image remains a historically determined cultural condition: the identitybetween the religious community and the civil community, between religion and Christianity, which, in the absence of a critical review of the model, each new declination tends to reproduce with inevitable conditioning of behaviour and relationships.

These correspondences, however, are both resolved. Subjecting the role and – hence – the model of parish complexes to a review, therefore, appears urgent if not overdue, given the acceleration of changes in the social structure, the radical restructuring of every cultural construction (from the idea of nature to the understanding of family and gender), the shattering of every unitary narrative – and of every authority – that sets itself at any level (moral, political, religious) as a principle of interpretation or fruition of the world.

A review of the models of parish centres is required both ex parte ecclesiae, so that they may effectively correspond to the primary purpose for which they arise and are specified in the current ecclesiastical perspective, and ex parte mundi, to verify the role they may play in the design of the city, in offering services, in building its image.

The question touches not only the complexes being planned or erected but also those already established, whose presence changes in terms of representativeness, role and interpretation. From images of the centre, they have become one among centres, in an urban dimension that has become polycentric and that, not by chance, admits its duality in the network, connection without a hierarchy of centres.

As a pivot between the Church and the world, the question of parish complexes entails a synoptic interpretation of both terms of the question, with an obvious amplification of the complexity and expertise required to unravel it.

Further compounding the difficulty of the analysis is the fact that there is no opposition between the two terms. This is not only because the Church takes on the travails and expectations of the world, but because the Church itself, in its social dimension, is a portion of the world. The consequences of this last consideration are measured first of all numerically, in the radical decline of believers and those attending religious practice. There is also a consequent and proportional decrease in the number of priests, whose number already proves to be lower than the number of parishes and structures to be managed.

The idea of the parish complex, therefore, needs not only a revision of its spatial conformation but also of its legal and management model, toallow for a different organization and an effective and substantial new distribution of responsibilities.

The subject is made particularly delicate, because if parishes are a “figure of the Church,” their reorganization also implies a re-interpretation of the Church itself.

This initiative proposes a critical review of a settlement pattern that, despite its undeniable importance in the structuring of the modern city, has had scarce emergence in cultural debate and research, due in part to the intrinsic complexity of the subject, a crossroads for most of the cultural and social phenomena that have contributed in the medium and long term to determining the current physiognomy of Europe and, in particular, of the country.

The critical review of the figure and role of parish complexes thus entails the involvement of all hermeneutic planes deriving from the specific disciplines of town planning and sociology, law and history, ecclesiology and theology, the consideration of which seems fundamental in terms of analysis and design, to contribute to an update on the spatial articulation, management and planning models for parish complexes suited to the conditions of contemporary cities.

THEMES

1. Space and its organization are hardly indifferent places. What is the ecclesiological paradigm and what is the relationship between Church and city underlying the models of parish centres that dot the contemporary city? Can one call for their ‘conversion’ or adaptation to the present? In light of what new interpretation, with what programmatic, managerial and legal implications?

2. The most daring or interesting design elaborations, of disruption and reconfiguration of the Church model manifested in parish complexes, are beyond the Alps. However, already the homologation of the programmatic and functional model of the parish complex, which has affected Italian realities from north to south, posed a problem regarding the limits of replicability of experiences and inspirations. The relationship between global and local is not new in the historical story of Christianity, and the concept of the parish is its latest declination, if, as a local image of the Church, it must take on the specificities of communities and places, the interpretation of peculiarities and traditions. In this tension between global and local tendencies, between universal and particular meanings, how do we build a balance? What conditions favour it, and what tools enable it?

3. Finally, there is a need to focus the analysis on the relationship between churches and the city. Having resolved the double link between religious community and civil community, and between religion and Christianity, what do churches represent for the city, and what does the city represent about parish complexes? What are the institutional, morphological and social, semantic and iconic relationships between churches and neighbourhoods, between city and church?

HOW TO APPLY

The conference will be held in Bologna, on March 7-8, 2024

Researchers, scholars and professors in architecture, urbanism, theology, sociology, and anthropology are invited to apply for the conference.

For applying to the conference, please send to thechurchesandthecity2024@aol.com the following materials:

- a world file with an abstract of 400 words maximum plus main bibliography,

- a world file with your brief CV, in no more than 200 words

Abstract selection will follow blind peer review processes.
The conference fee will be waived for those whose abstracts will be accepted.

Full papers will be asked after the conference. A selection of the most significant works (still selected with a blind peer review process) will be published on In_bo. Ricerche e progetti per il territorio, la città e l’architettura. The publication of the volume will be free of charge for all admitted authors and it is expected by February 2025

 

DEADLINES

NEW DEADLINE January 8th, 2023 | Deadline for abstract submission

January 15th, 2024 | Notification of abstract acceptance or refusal

January 29th, 2024 | Submission of revised abstract and conference registration

March 7-8th, 2024 | Conference in Bologna

May 27th, 2024 | Deadline for full paper submission

July 22nd, 2024 | Notification of full papers acceptance

February 2025 | Publication of the volume