Envisioning New Urban Architectures for a Changing Japan
Raffaele Pernice
Wednesday, 28 January 2026, 6:00 PM–7:30 PM JST
26年1月28日（水）18:30～20:00
Kyoto University Katsura Campus, C2-413
京都大学 桂キャンパスC2-413講義室
The Japanese avant-garde architectural movement of Metabolism emerged in the 1960s led by a new generation of architects and designers who were looking at the future of the city in a period of fundamental paradigms shifts and new challenges for Japanese cities. The key features of the new urbanism proposed by Metabolists reveal a persistent links between present and past with the scope of re-imagining new urban futures for Japan as well as proposing the design of innovative intra-urban relationships and spaces in an urban environment in tumultuous transformation. The lecture introduces holistic reflections on the present relevance of the urban proposals of the Metabolists and critically reconsiders their investigation of the various aspects of urban futures (in terms of form, economic structure, society, and cultural meaning) in the larger context of the historical studies of the city and the current evolution of city planning and urban design theories.
Raffaele Pernice is a 2026 JSPS BRIDGE Fellow at Kyushu University and is a licensed architect and Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urbanism at UNSW Sydney. Recipient of a Monbukagakusho Scholarship and a JSPS Postdoc Research Fellowship, he holds a PhD in Architecture from Waseda University and a MArch from IUAV University, Italy. Dr. Pernice’s research interests devote particular attention to modern and post-modern architectural and urban design theories, the relationship between architecture and the city. He is interested in the transformation and development of the cities of Japan and the urbanism in the Asia Pacific region, exploring in particular the nexus between urban regeneration practice and experimental architecture design. Dr. Pernice has published in academic journals in the field of the built environment, and he is editor of the books Waterfront Regeneration in a Time of Climate Change(Routledge, 2025), and The Urbanism of Metabolism (Routledge, 2022).
