Pop-up City

"Pop-up City" is a photographic research project curated by Luisa Bravo and supported by City Space Architecture, nonprofit cultural association. Photography: Fabio Mantovani Working on different locations, the "Pop-up City" project intends to highlight existing places with a potential for public life, looking for invisible dimensions of the public realm, searching for an "ordinary magic" along everyday streets, squares and neighborhoods, delivering new powerful images of the urban world. The project explores in particular those suburban places generally disconnected from the mental representation of the urban narrative plot of public spaces, made of beauty and fascination, with no identity and continuity with the historic environment. We are moving further from the European mental attitude that immediately links the concept of “public space” to the idea of a traditional designed square. These places are part of the everyday existence, but common people are accustomed to experience them as fragments in a sort of jump-cut urbanism, affected by the use of cars. We pass through but we don’t see. The Pop-up City project is trying to document what is now largely undocumented. The first exhibition was held in Bologna, at Palazzo Pepoli, Museum of the History of Bologna, 27 June - 20 July 2014, with the support of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna and Genus Bononiae. The project was then invited and presented at the "Future of Places" conference, held in Buenos Aires, 1-3 September 2014, promoted by UN-Habitat, Ax:son Johnson Foundation and by Project for Public Spaces. The second exhibition was held in Hong Kong, 8-15 November 2014, as part of the "Magic Carpet: re-envisioning community space" project, promoted by the Master of Science in Urban Design of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.