Thinking, writing the city

International meetig : ” Thinking, writing the city”

Tuesday 23 and Wednesday 24 November 2022

Call for papers

The Interdisciplinary Human Sciences Research Laboratory (LARISH) of the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of Mohammedia – Hassan II University is organizing an international symposium on the theme “Thinking, writing the city” from Tuesday 23 to Wednesday 24 November 2022.

At the start of the 21st century, it has become tautological to say that the city occupies a preponderant role in our lives in all cultural, economic, political and sociological fields. Rampant urbanization profoundly affects all spheres of our existence.

The city is more than ever the place of mixing and mixing, where the city dweller is subject to the centrifugal and centripetal forces of exclusion and/or inclusion. Since Antiquity, it has constituted a privileged breeding ground for human reflection and imagination.

The presence of the city in the “Logos” and the “Mythos” goes back to a distant temporality. During Antiquity, interest in the city (polis), essentially in its ideal (utopian) or political form of city-state, never waned (Aristotle Politics, (384-322 BC). C) Plato The Republic (427 to 348 BC)). The biblical tradition has consecrated, for its part, the image of a cursed construction, object of all hatred, even of all repulsion, built by fratricidal hands, place of depravity and perversion, object of ire and divine wrath. In this theological context, the city, taxed as trivial and obscene, is diametrically opposed to the spiritual and sacrosanct model of the “city of God”, set up of course as a unique utopia endowed with virtues. In literature, since the advent of the picaresque novel, the city has turned into an essential cliché in novelistic writing. Modernity in the 19th century will see the triumphal entry of the city into the temple of poetry (Badelaire, Verhaeren, etc.), while the emergence of the human sciences has made it a crucible and a crossroads of writing in which urbanity and the urban come in symbols and representations that saturate all levels and species of saying and scientifically instituted discourses. In the 20th century, cinema and the modern novel, whose essence and development are deeply urban, drew their substance, their material and their vision of the world from the city.

It is a question, for us, of giving an account, in this international interdisciplinary colloquium, of this discursive richness whose supports and versions intersect in what we can currently name the thought and the writing of the urban.

This symposium invites researchers from various backgrounds and disciplines to contribute to a rich and multidisciplinary discussion around the subject of the city, the influence of the urban on literature, the visual arts, philosophy, to name a few. than these. We welcome papers claiming to be from the humanities, literature, architecture, history, linguistics, geography, cinema, social sciences, and computer science (connected city, smart city ).

Thematic axes:
Without limitation, proposals may relate to:
1. Fragmentation of the city: borders and limits
2. Architectural additions: construction and incompleteness
3. City and history of social relations
4. City and territorial policy
5. Urbanity in historical narratives
6. Ancient cities and the challenges of modernization
7. City, languages ​​and languages, linguistic territories, urban territories and dialects, diversity, transmission and identity
8. The city and the visual arts (painting, cinema, installations, etc.)
9. Urban writings (posters, graffiti, tags, etc.)
10. The Romance of the City
11. The digital city, the smart city, the connected city.