co+labo radović   co+labo opens research fieldwork training with Professor Leonardo Chiesi 
With an introductory, highly stimulating lecture visiting professor Leonardo Chiesi has started co+labo fieldwork research training programme, conducted within the framework of our broad investigations of Smart(er) Communities.
Leonardo brings in selected sociological perspectives, with a aim to add quality to established strengths of our laboratory and Keio practices of teaching, learning and investigating production of space.  

All co+labo students are taking part in this training, the fieldwork component of which is loosely structured around four projects: "The potential of play in recycling of infrastructural urban landscapes" which focuses at Akihabara (Alice Covatta), "Contested urban landscapes" in Shibuya (Ana Medina), "Impact of safety measures on spatial usage and perception" in the vicinity of selected embassy compounds in Tokyo (Ivan Filipović) and  "Discretionary activities: transactions between people and urban environments" in Taito-ku (Vedrana Ikalović).

Professor Chiesi's programme include intensive consultations with co+labo researchers and PhD students, which hold promise for further collaboration and are expected to generate a number of joint research publications.   

co+labo radović Alison Young@co+labo: "On Precariousness, Public Culture+the 'Open City'"
Professor Alison Young delivered a research seminar in which she discussed how anxieties about the vulnerability of the city resonate within experiences of urban public spaces and public cultures such as graffiti and street art. For a number of years she has been researching the ways in which illicit place-making cultural practices, in cities such as London, Melbourne, New York, Berlin and Paris, have been regarded as social problems to be contained and controlled. Alison's recent investigations have expanded to examine a broader landscape of contestation around the production and maintenance of certain urban ‘atmospheres’. Her interests are both in moving through the changing neighbourhoods of the city, and in tracking change within neighbourhoods over time, in order to propose ways in which we can encounter urban environments as citizens and wayfarers, and achieve a more complex understanding of openness in the contemporary city.

co+labo radović   Leonardo Chiesi and Alison Young open co+labo 2017 guest lecture series  
Professors Alison Young (University of Melbourne) and Leonardo Chiesi (University of Florence) will be visiting co+labo this week, and open our series of guest lectures for the school year 2017. 
Leonardo returns to co+labo for the third time, now as a Visiting Professor at Keio University, to engage with current research projects in our laboratory. His two weeks long visit includes seminars, workshops, fieldwork sessions and an open lecture (scheduled for 24 April; details will be announced on this blog).

Alison has kindly accepted to spend some of her time in Tokyo with us, and address co+labo research group and students on Tuesday, 18 April, presenting her work On Precariousness, Public Cultures, and the ‘Open City'. 

Alison Young is the Francine V. McNiff Professor of Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Street Art World (2016), Street Art, Public City (2014), The Scene of Violence (2010), Street/Studio (2010), Judging the Image (2005) and Imagining Crime (1996), as well as numerous articles on the intersections of law, crime, and the image. Alison is the founder of the Urban Environments Research Network, and is currently developing a study of crime and neighbourhood change in Australia and Japan. At the University Melbourne, she is a member of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, an interdisciplinary group of academics, artists, policymakers and urban designers interested in communicative cities, mobility, networked cultures, and public space.

Leonardo Chiesi is an Associate Professor at University of Florence and a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. He specializes in ambiental and territorial sociology, which he teaches at the School of Architecture, University of Florence. His research introduces social methods into investigations of quality of architecture and planning, and has been involved in a number of architectural design and city planning projects, expanding an interest in the subjects of local identity, community processes and participation methods. Professor Chiesi wrote books on the construction of scientific discourse (Retorica nella scienza. Come la scienza costruisce i suoi argomenti anche al di là della logica, 2009) and on the relationship between social sciences, architecture and planning (Il doppio spazio dell’architettura. Ricerca sociologica e progettazione, 2010).