The Forum was attended by some 300 participants from all continents, and featured keynote addresses by internationally-renowned experts including urbanism and regeneration advisor Ricky Burdett; Detroit Free Press journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Henderson; African infrastructure and development expert Carlos Lopes, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA); and Ambassador for Water, Henk Ovink, Special Envoy for International Water Affairs, the Netherlands.
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keynotes and workshop sessions
The notion of performance was explored in its technological as well as its social, political, constructive, and aesthetic dimensions, in different geographical and temporal contexts, through discussion of concrete examples of buildings and their components.
Infrastructure was thought of as a site of collective design engagement for the urban and its permutations that requires an expanded repertoire of tools; from entry points, like the sites of interface between systems and scales, to representations that could enable ways to generate alternative infrastructural forms.
When infrastructure is conceived and constructed at the territorial scale its systems and logics cross boundaries and jurisdictions, territorializing regional geographies. This workshop focused on interdependent, overlapping infrastructures through three dominant themes: water, energy and risk.
This workshop took several case studies from across the globe to explore the consequences of the supposedly non-urban realm now being engulfed within the variegated patterns and pathways of a planetary formation of urbanization.
Posters by students from 12 of the world’s leading technical universities were displayed at the 5th International Holcim Forum 2016.
The posters encouraged stimulating discussions on approaches to sustainable construction. All Forum participants were eligible to vote in the Student Poster Competition.
Infrastructure Space is a collection of 25 essays inspired by the 5th LafargeHolcim Forum for Sustainable Construction on the theme of “Infrastructure Space” held in Detroit, USA in April 2016.
