Once upon a place

Once upon a place: Haunted houses and imaginary cities

LISBON (PT) - Unexpectedly, fiction has become a subject in its own right when you look at architecture and the city. Fiction emerged as possibility, as an alternative way of thinking, as an unpredicted tool for knowledge. Fiction is what defies strict reasoning and permanently challenges our attempts at a complete and final analysis. But fiction also provides a sublime escape from the deeper shades of irrationality affecting a society that suddenly discovers itself unsustainable.

Be it in literary or visual form, be it in narrative or experimental modes, fiction appears as the way in which the human mind reflects its condition and redesigns its prospects. And this is precisely where it intersects with the nature of architecture and urban planning.

Once Upon a Place will disclose some amazing glimpses on how fiction produces visions, approaches, and instruments that urban spatial practices currently appropriate so as to renew themselves. Out of 250 submissions, more than 30 authors, artists, architects and urban researchers – including key-note speakers such as Albert Manguel, Schuiten & Peeters or Kazys Varnelis – are bound to question if the imagination of fiction is not the ultimate gizmo with which to face a reality that has gone… stranger than fiction.