co+labo radović  co+labo lecture series continues with Dr Heide Imai's talk on Tokyo Roji    

Since co+labo was inaugurated in 2009, Dr Heide Imai was one of the regular contributors to our laboratory and broader Keio architecture activities - as a member of research teams, research discussant, design critic and an always generous guest lecturer. She  come back to co+labo, with a lecture within the graduate Advanced Sustainable Architecture and Urban Design programme. Heide's lecture "Alleyways Between Conflict, Change and Cultural Innovation" focused at parts of her book Tokyo Roji: The Diversity and Versatility of Alleys in a City in Transition, published recently by reputable Rutledge. She asked "If the streets of Tokyo could talk, what stories would they tell us?" and now summarises how the lecture "presented the role and meaning of the roji in Tokyo and sought to go behind the façade of the contemporary urban landscape to re-contextualise these forgotten yet necessary, marginal yet present places of everyday life. Marginalised through the emergence of new forms of housing and public spaces, re-appropriated by different fields, and re-invented by the contemporary urban design discourse, the social meaning attached to the roji is being re-interpreted by individuals, subcultures and new social movements. To portray the life cycle of an urban form being rediscovered, commodified and lost as physical space, I made use of historical references, urban narratives, graphic reinterpretations and exemplary study cases, to finally disclose questions of the roji's future, its new actors and its new possibilities, closing with a critical statement: what is needed to create cultural and environmental sustainability?"

Dr. Heide Imai's  is Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies (GIS) at Hosei University and Research Associate at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. Licensed as an architect, her research, teaching and practice focus is urban resistance, resilience and the future of vernacular landscapes in global cities. Her forthcoming book Everyday Yokohama will also be published by Rutledge (2019).

co+labo radović       an official Keio photo of co+labo members .... at the end of 2018           

Around this time every year, Faculty of Science and Technology organises photo-shooting sessions for all of its research laboratories. Here is our co+labo, or et lats the members who were in on Tuesday 4 December 2018 at 11.30 a.m.

Top row, left to right: Iwata Amami (UG), Sanja Žonja (Special Visiting Student), Ivan Filipović (PhD); mid row: Alice Covatta (Japan Foundation Research Fellow), Vedrana Ikalović (PhD), Matsubara Motomi (UG), Kawamoto Jumpei (UG), Hiroki Shigemura (UG); on the ground: Suzuki Akitaka (Research Assistant), Motoyama Masahito (M1), Onishi Keitaro (M2), Darko Radović, Mikogami Mayuko (M2), Ayumu Magome (M2), Nishibori Shinichi (UG). Missing in action (or otherwise) were: Sano Satoshi (Technical Secretary+PhD), Marco Capitanio (PhD), Yamashita Shohei (Double Degree at Politecnico di Milano), Morimoto Mei (Double Degree at KTH Stockholm), Takasu Yukie (AA Masters Programme, London), Kobayashi Daisuke (M2) and Ishii Yumi, Kato Shun, Kinoshita Norimi,  Samejima Takuomi, Yang Xuan (all M1 co+labo students).

co+labo radović    ..... and + and + and ................................++......................................+..+...    

Darko was invited to comment on two guest lectures at the University of Tokyo, Faculty of Architecture - which were delivered within Okabe Akiko's project on Mapping Urbanities. Hesam Kamalipour from Cardiff University presented of his work on Informal/Formal Morphologies (published in Kim Dovey's Mapping Urbanities Morphologies, Flows, Possibilities), while Yuki Akiyama elaborated of the latest in Japanese big data mapping technologies. 
An interesting discussion continued across Hongo Dori, in one of izakayas frequented by Todai staff and students.