Ambiances (Jul 2017)
Rénovation urbaine post-industrielle et mise en ambiance méditerranéenne à Kawasaki : une rédemption par le pastiche ?
Abstract
In Downtown Kawasaki the presence of an industrial brownfield (ex-Toshiba factory) and the fact that commuters arriving from Tokyo just rushed towards their respective residential neighbourhoods combined in making the local characters of urbanity very fragile. Local authorities and two major real estate and commercial companies asked, at the end of the 1990s and following two decades of reflections on information technologies being a tool of urban revitalization, two foreign architects, Jon Jerde and Ricardo Bofill, to work on urban atmospheres. Both chose to build a pastiche urban scenography inspired by the Mediterranean. The object of this article is to analyse how such post-modern cultural fictions reflect present trends in themed urbanism, to reflect on pastiche as a tool of urbanity creation and to discuss what constitutes the very fundamental characters of urbanity.
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