The one-day conference The Materialities of the Ephemeral City is organised through an inter-university partnership between the Observatoire de la condition suburbaine (OCS) laboratory at ENSA Paris-Est and the LAB research institute at UCLouvain. From an interdisciplinary perspective, it explores the material dimensions of temporary urban installations erected for celebrations, festivals, events, and protests. These include lightweight and demountable structures, performative installations, street furniture, scenographies, and performances created with “soft materials” such as plants, sand, edible products, screens, bodies, and phenomena including light, sound, and optical effects.

The conference is guided by the hypothesis that the “ephemeral city” is first and foremost a city of materials: one that reconfigures the use of streets and squares while shifting canonical definitions of architecture. It will examine the political and symbolic agency of these “soft materials,” their sensory phenomenologies, the collective rituals of making and unmaking, as well as the traces, waste, and ecologies they generate. Conceived as a critical laboratory, the conference brings together contributions spanning different periods and geographies in order to shed light on how these material assemblages celebrate, challenge, or subvert the urban order, and how they offer alternatives to the dominant rhythms of the contemporary city.

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