The Rediscovery of the City

Text: Kissfazekas Kornélia

This writing is about a university programme. An experiment applying a wider variety of tools for getting to know the cities. It was meant to co-ordinate the approaches of groups (local population, users of the cities, tourists) and the methods of various sciences; architecture, urban architecture, environment psychology, urban maintenance and tourism by merging the special ways of thinking related to them as fields of education and research, as well as applying their means. An experiment, which is not targeted to the ultimate result or to make a revelation to salve the world, but to try out a work process and methodology. As for its contents: how we could find, collect, define and represent the faculties of an excitingly multi-layered urban district which is not necessarily a prioritized tourist destination area which could offer experience for others. Beyond cognition a tactile benefit was also expectable as a result of analysis work of this kind. To define, identify and name what seems unphraseable: why is a place a good one and what we find attractive in it. Besides listing each individual object-like item, and beyond the naming and identification of cultural events that take place: are these values presentable and transferable? And if so, which could be the ones and what means do we need to represent them? All this is summarized in alternative guidelines which is not based on the object-approach applied so widespread in tourism.