Next Saturday —February 4, 2012— José Luis Vallejo and Edgar Pieterse will be giving a lecture about “Authorship and collaboration” as part of the Urban Design Conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The conference, subtitled Conditions and projections, hopes to propel a discussion about the unfulfilled potential of the practice of Urban Design and the role it can play in mediating the different disciplines and forces that eventually mould the built environment in our cities, suburbs and peri-urban conditions —the larger landscape that comprises the objects of human interventions of various kinds.

Participants in the conference will address 6 specific aspects relevant to contemporary discourse in Urban Design:

• Land/form or the re-consideration of architecture’s traditional relationship to the ground, city and landscape, no longer occupying a site but instead, constructing and transforming the site itself.
• Micro-Urbanisms or how in the context of crisis and uncertainty, local, networked, and even intangible interventions can have a direct impact on urban life.
• Applied Research or the instrumental use of teaching and academia’s theories, methods and techniques for the purpose of real transformation of the urban realm.
• Regulatory Practices that actively engage design through planning and policy making to propose more comprehensive scenarios to the current physical transformations of the built environment.
• Strategic Upgrading, or the idea of large-scale transformation precipitated by strategic changes in the urban microcosm.
• Authorship and Collaboration, or the exploration of current thinking about the role of collective authorship and collaboration within the design process in response to diverse working scales, emerging technologies and degrees of complexity

You can learn more about the conference at the official website.