LINA Conference: Alliances for a Resourceful City

The 2023 LINA Conference will bring together the platform’s member organizations and the newly selected emerging talents—LINA fellows—along with local and international keynote speakers. It’s an opportunity to connect, exchange ideas, and discuss novel visions for the city that aspire to bring about more liveable futures.

The event is free of charge, and will also be streamed live on this page and on the LINA YouTube channel.

Alliances for a resourceful city
Humanity is vastly exceeding our planetary boundaries: the ways in which we inhabit our planet are due for an immediate and radical change. In this environmental emergency, architects are called to take the lead. The contemporary city is the focal site where architecture should tackle environmental sustainability issues. 

The majority of all buildings in Europe are found in urban settlements, where more than 70 percent of the EU population resides, even though adequate housing is increasingly outside the reach of those without generational wealth. Our cities, which were tailored to the production processes of the past, are eating up the majority of global resources while becoming emblems of social inequality.

Can we transform contemporary urbanity into a sustainable, post-extractivist metropolitan area? How can we encourage the shift from building to renovating? How can we organise our cities around sustainable mobility and efficient food supply? Can we intervene in the infrastructure that supports our excessive way of living and gear it up for processes of degrowth? The LINA community—an alliance of architectural organisations and emerging professionals and thinkers—wonders: can we create more resilient cities, focused on de-growth?

Programme and featured speakers
The two-day conference programme will feature the 28 2023 LINA fellows, up-and-coming spatial practitioners that have just been selected at the annual Open Call, as well as invited speakers who will further expand the theme of the conference.

Day 1: Monday, October 9, 2023 (All times CEST)

10:00 Welcome address
Josephine Michau, Co-founder and CEO, Copenhagen Architecture Festival
Jakob Brandtberg Knudsen, Dean, Royal Danish Academy - Architecture
Matevž Čelik, Head of LINA, the European Architecture Platform

10:15 LINA fellow panel 1: Exploring Coexistence
Invisible jobs in the city
The Missing Dimension
Eden’s Archipelago
The Minor and its Spatialities
Objects of the Encounter
Memoryscapes of Sarajevo

10:45 LINA fellow panel 2: Cycles of Transformation
Future Foodscapes Compendium
Georgian Railways: How Trains can Remake a Country
Building Transparency
Cosmic Undergrounds
Cycle of materials
Building, Unbuilding, Rebuilding

11:45 LINA fellow panel 3: Beyond City Limits
Academy of Margins
Soil-Knowledge
Peripheral Cartographies
(De)Growing the Rural Village of the Future
An Atlas of forest occupations
Alluring Rural

12:15 LINA fellow panel 4: Progressive Cityscapes
The Grafted City
Migration & the urbanism of assimilation
The Degrowth Institute
As if radio…AIR
Never Never School

2:30 LINA fellow panel 5: Materials Matter
Deconstruction of an Olive
Wild Hedges
reuse.matters
Experimental House
Miniera

Day 2: Tuesday, October 10, 2023 (All times CEST)

10:45 Welcome and presentation of new LINA member
Matevž Čelik, Head of LINA, the European Architecture Platform
Anna Pashynska, MetaLab, new LINA member

11:00 The State of Architecture
Nick Axel

11:30 Focus talk 1: Medium Design
Keller Easterling

12:00 Focus talk 2: Building for Copenhagen Life
Camilla Van Deurs

2:00 Focus talk 3: Extending technologies of the past towards solutions for the present and visions of the future
Phil Ayres

2:30 A Resourceful City: Insights and Actions
Roundtable, featuring Keller Easterling, Camilla Van Deurs, Phil Ayres, Jutta Kastner and Matevž Čelik

3:30 Final remarks & conclusion

See the full programme here.

LINA fellows: Rajna Avramova, E+D, ewa effiom, Alberto Roncelli, Foil&Soil Mishmash, Jade Apack, Johanna Musch, Océane Ragoucy, Rachel Rouzaud + Bernadetta Budzik, George Guledani, Baukreisel, EJ Williams, Soundcamp, Studio ACTE, Superposition, Laura Hurley, Anna Perugini, Giulio Galasso, Robida, METASITU, Dérive, DOING.pt, Spolka, Al-Wah’at, Future Foodscapes Research Unit—FFRU, Marió Molina_RDA Studio, Margarida Waco, Wit[h]nessing.

Nick Axel is an architect, editor, educator, and curator. He is Deputy Editor of e-flux Architecture, Head of the Architectural Design department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and from 2020–2022 was Curator of Architecture and Chair of the Architectural Advisory Board at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Kyiv.

Keller Easterling is a designer, writer, and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. Her books include Medium Design (Verso, 2021), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005), and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999).

Camilla van Deurs is the Chief City Architect for the City of Copenhagen since February 2019, working to shape a more livable capital in one of the world’s most sustainable cities. Among other green initiatives she chairs Copenhagen’s involvement in CirCuit, a collaborative EU project across four cities: Copenhagen, Hamburg, the Helsinki region (City of Vantaa) and Greater London who have teamed up with partners from the entire built environment value chain.

Phil Ayres is an architect, researcher and educator. He holds the newly established Chair for Bio-hybrid Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy—the first professorship of its kind within Danish architectural research and education. The research focus at the chair is the design and production of novel bio-hybrid architectural systems that aim to symbiotically couple technical & living complexes, together with the development of complimentary design environments and design methodologies.

Produced by the LINA platform in collaboration with Copenhagen Architecture Festival and in partnership with the Royal Danish Academy. The event is supported by the Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in Denmark. The LINA platform is co-funded by the EU.