On Tuesday, July 21, three residents of the Architecture Ukraine project – METASITU (Liva Dudareva (Latvia) and Eduardo Cassina (Spain) / architecture, urbanism; Justin Tyler Tate (USA/Canada) / art; Lucia Maffei (Italy) / architecture – talked about their previous projects, ideas and experiences.

Despite different topics, instruments and techniques that have been used, the common focus was about communities, their visual representation, communication and miscommunication, identity, existence strategies, aesthetics, etc. That’s why stories about their projects are not only stories about describing specific territory (local factories, centers for displaced people, cities or countries), but also a way of how they interact in a global world and a global society.

Participants came from the notion that the whole world is urban, and it has specific characteristics in business, technology and development, as well as a specific local environment, culture and identity. The question is how space, time and culture interact with each other and how to implement those interactions in the community and vice versa.

In particular, Lucia Maffei talked about the problem of miscommunication in Cambodia and Palestine – conflict zones with specific economic and social responsibility. Liva Dudareva and Eduardo Cassina were interested in a more global concept of ‘ecumenopolis’ (from Greek: οἰκουμένη, meaning ‘world’, and πόλις polis meaning ‘city’), thus a city made of the whole world; pl. ecumenopolises or ecumenopoleis) which is the hypothetical concept of a planet-wide city. Justin Tyler Tate discussed the development of unique infrastructure facility, which reflects on itself, as well as his implemented projects.