Overview
The 5th Woltz Symposium, Ecologies of Prosperity for the Living City, promotes design as knowledge producer and as an instrument for engaging today’s most pressing sociopolitical, environmental, and urban challenges. At the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Architecture, we are committed to educating global citizens as independent critical thinkers, inclined to dialogue, action, and democratic convictions. Our goal is that the work of our speakers and dialogue with the audience will inspire a forum of citizens, a “parliament for the urban Anthropocene.”
The conversation will progress from Table 1, Novel Synergies, focused on the transformation of ‘ecosystem functions’, to Table 2, the Instrumental Commons, imagining the role of citizenry facing socio-ecological challenges, followed by Table 3, Dispersed Concentrations, where spatial organizations of societal values, power, and culture will shape an understanding of urbanization. The comprehensive purpose of the 2016 Woltz Symposium is evidenced at the last table, where a set of transformative values of a future global society will be discussed. As inhabitants of this planet, our challenge is to imagine a new notion of prosperity linked to the interdependence between available resources and well-being.
The conversation will progress from Table 1, Novel Synergies, focused on the transformation of ‘ecosystem functions’, to Table 2, the Instrumental Commons, imagining the role of citizenry facing socio-ecological challenges, followed by Table 3, Dispersed Concentrations, where spatial organizations of societal values, power, and culture will shape an understanding of urbanization. The comprehensive purpose of the 2016 Woltz Symposium is evidenced at the last table, where a set of transformative values of a future global society will be discussed. As inhabitants of this planet, our challenge is to imagine a new notion of prosperity linked to the interdependence between available resources and well-being.