Miodrag Mitrasinovic is an architect, author and Associate Professor at The School of Design Strategies, Parsons The New School for Design. He currently serves as Chair of Urban and Transdisciplinary Design in the School of Design Strategies. His professional and scholarly work has been published internationally, including the Journal of Architecture and Building Science of the Architectural Institute of Japan, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and Metropolis. He is the author of Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space (Ashgate 2006), and co-editor of Travel, Space, Architecture (Ashgate 2009). Both books are recipients of the prestigious Graham Foundation Grant in 2004 and 2005 respectively. He is a member of the international editorial board of Design and Culture (Berg), and has also served in a variety of scholarly, professional and editorial roles.
Mitrasinovic holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Florida at Gainesville, United States [1998], MArch from The Berlage Institute, the Netherlands [1994], and Diploma in Architectural Engineering (Dipl. Ing. Arh.) from the University of Belgrade, Serbia [1992]. Before joining The New School in 2005, he held teaching and research appointments at the University of Texas at Austin [1998-2005] and the University of Florida at Gainesville [1995-96 and 1997-98] in the United States, and at Kyoto University in Japan [1996-97]. Overall, he has over fifteen years of teaching and curriculum development experience in architecture, transdisciplinary design, integrative design education, and design studies. Since 2006, he has led the development and accreditation of urban design and urban studies programs at Parsons as well as across The New School; he currently serves as co-Chair of The New School Academic Committee on Urban Programs. He has also led the development of the new, undergraduate transdisciplinary curriculum of the Integrated Design BFA program in the School of Design Strategies (Integrated Design Curriculum), scheduled for launch in fall of 2009. Currently, together with a group of Parsons colleagues, Mitrasinovic is developing new graduate degrees in Urban Design Ecologies and Urban Design Studies, scheduled for launch in 2011.
Mitrasinovic frequently lectures and reviews student projects at architecture and design schools worldwide, among many at the Pratt Institute, The Berlage Institute, the University of Texas at Austin, Kyoto University, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University of Pennsylvania, University of Belgrade, Princeton University, Cornell University, and Izmir University of Economics.
Since 1995, Mitrasinovic has been engaged in an independent and collaborative design and design-research practice focused on architecture, urban knowledge and research, urban design, and design consulting. His research and projects include urban research and urban design study for the West coast of Barbados and the Speightstown region commissioned by the Government of Barbados (with the University of Florida Preservation Institute: Caribbean), the winning competition entry for the design of the infrastructure for improved urban mobility in Timisoara, Romania (with the Florida Research Ensemble), numerous international urban design and architecture competitions, design of the first Montessori School in Belgrade, Serbia (that included design of the modular furniture system), and most recently the completion of the 8,000sf House Potparevic in Belgrade, Serbia (with Dva Studio: Vuja Alexandru and Milan Djuric).
Mitrasinovic’s work continues to be focused on new ways of understanding, engaging with, and acting in relation to emerging urban processes, practices, phenomena, forms and conditions. He is currently focused on developing an integrated approach under the conceptual umbrella of “Cities and Urban Futures.” Cities and Urban Futures is a project that attempts to contextualize many well-document but largely misunderstood facts. For instance, that more than half of all humans today live in nearly four hundred city-regions, across the world that has experienced largest and most dramatic global migrations in its history caused equally by wars, economic inequalities, as well as by environmental degradation and disasters of historic proportions. The dissolution of national boundaries, the continuous consolidation of the global market despite its current crisis, and the dissolution of the previously recognizable boundaries between spaces of physical and media presences, have created entirely new dimensions of human experience of and in the world, much of which is urban in configuration. At the same time, industrial cities of the 19th and early 20th century are experiencing serious and systematic breakdown of most of their material and ecological infrastructure: the fact that is painfully obvious to those currently leaving in New York City. As cities face cutting of capital budgets and maintenance funds, and private investors lack of available capital and incentives for joining private-public partnerships, we basically may, within one generation, face the same set of questions residents of Mumbai slums face today.
Simultaneously, the term ‘urban’ has never before represented such a rich spectrum of practices, relations, processes, meanings and human experiences of the world, nor it has ever before indicated such an incredible multiplicity, variety and diversity. As we learn how to grapple with the emerging urban conditions at entirely new scales, we also begin to understand that one of the most desirable properties of these emerging urbanities is their concurrency (hence the title of the symposium Miodrag organized with Ivan Kucina in April 2009 at the School of Design Strategies: Concurrent Urbanities). In other words, Cities and Urban Futures project is interested in unearthing and revealing the forms of contemporary urban experience and understanding how such forms resonate off each other, where and how they do intersect, what kind of infrastructure underlies them, and what kind of emerging urban conditions they create in the process of co-existence and their continual juxtapositions.
The goal of Cities and Urban Futures is to place global forces in relation to local, situated urban knowledge and practices so that emerging patterns of urbanity at large can be clearly unearthed and explored. This is nothing short of an epistemological project, but one properly situated at The New School, an academic institution with preeminent traditions in design and social sciences. The necessity for an integrated theoretical approach to these issues –particularly across design and social sciences, but also including environmental and ecological sciences—emerges out of the recognition that the complexity of urban conditions and process we witness today cannot be adequately framed, explored, theorized and acted upon from any one disciplinary or professional ground alone. The challenges we face today exceed the capacity of single individuals and single disciplines, as well as single existing theoretical frameworks, to be systematically comprehended. In other words, no existing normative planning theory contains anything that can be useful in face of the fact, for example, that by most optimistic predictions half of all humans living in city regions by mid-21st century will de facto live in what we today call “slums”, improvised and informal urban settlements that sometimes acquire properties of cities in miniature, or even real cities with alternative forms of economic exchange and localized, communal forms of administration. What is desperately needed is new type of knowledge, new forms of collaborative practices, new mind-sets to address these pressing issues.
In that respect, Miodrag’s work is currently focused on exploring new roles that designers and design researchers play, and the design theories, methods and techniques they employ, to encourage radical democratization, forms of social resistance, economic equity, and environmental sustainability of the urban world. Besides, he is equally engaged in building collaborative practices with professionals and scholars in other fields, particularly with colleagues from across the social sciences, engaged in new forms of knowledge production. His current research attempts to map out individuals and groups whose work proposes radical remapping of the relationships between urban practices and design through broad participatory design processes, bottom-up organizational approaches, innovative networking, as well as through emergent approaches to urban field operations.
As a project at The School of Design Strategies, Cities and Urban Futures attempts also to create a meeting ground for colleagues and students interested in exploring the urban worlds at this incredible and historic juncture, but specifically to those who also believe that connections between design and social sciences is the most fruitful intellectual and practical territory from which to begin to initiate this ambitious undertaking.
Mitrasinovic’s first book, Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space, employed the theme park in identifying, dissecting and describing the properties of PROPASt – privately-owned publicly accessible space in a themed mode – a hybrid form of public space emerging in urban environments worldwide. Mitrasinovic does not propose that theme parks and PROPASt are, or will ever become, desirable substitutes for democratic public space, but deliberately cuts across the ‘theme park model’ in order to understand the principle of systematic totality employed when such a model is used to ‘revitalize’ urban public space in the United States, Asia and Europe. In doing so, Mitrasinovic has created compelling and multifaceted inferences out of a plethora of minute details on the design and production of theme parks across continents.
Mitrasinovic’s central argument is that the process of systematic totalization that brings theme parks and PROPASt into the same conceptual framework is not only obvious through formal similarities, but also through systemic and symbolic analogies: through values, conditions and techniques that have been extended upon the entire social realm. By illuminating the relationship between theme parks and public space, this book offers critical insights into the ethos of ‘total landscape,’ a condition that emerges from overpowering convergences of the following three domains: a/globally emerging socio-economic system organized upon the idea of systematic totality; b/material apparatus that establishes its dominance ‘on the ground;’ and c/system of totalizing narratives -designed and operated by the media and entertainment industry- that establish its dominance in social and cultural imaginations across national boundaries. One of the central premises of this book is that theme parks and PROPASt are complex artifacts designed to materialize such convergences and to spatialize corresponding social and environmental relationships. Mitrasinovic builds his compelling narrative by simultaneously studying phenomena, processes, practices, and forms interwoven in the types of spatial production characteristic of the total landscape.
Mitrasinovic’s second book, Travel, Space, Architecture (co-edited with Jilly Traganou), explores how conditions of physical and metaphorical dislocation affect spatio-architectural practices, and how these conditions redefine parallel notions of place, culture and identity. Traganou and Mitrasinovic claim the need to define a new theoretical territory in architectural, urban and design scholarship that studies practices of inhabitation and processes of spatial production via the notion of travel. The book attempts to reveal the historical fact that spatio-architectural practices, in their symbolic as well as in their material dimensions, are and have always been multisited and thus have to be examined through the prism of trajectories and networks rather than through singular perceptions of place and essentialist notions of identity and culture. Traganou and Mitrasinovic examine the multiple relationships that emerge between the acts of traveling and the conceptualization, representation, and production of space in its various scales and modes – architectural, urban, geographic, social, cultural and political – and within various contexts of modernity in which the “work of imagination,” which is vitally connected with possibilities of travel, plays a central role. The book presents seventeen key case studies from a diverse range of perspectives including historical, theoretical, and praxis-based, and range from interrogations of architectural travel and notions of belonging and nationhood to challenging established geopolitical hierarchies. The chapters examine a spectrum of encounters in various cultural and historical contexts, from the eighteenth century to the present, that led to the production of diverse media and forms of spatial representation and inhabitation, from cartographies and travel diaries to interiors, buildings, landscapes and urban environments. The relationships this book explores are the effects of cross-cultural encounters that occurred in the context of a variety of travel modes, including exploratory, professional, or educational travel; as well as through tourism, colonization, immigration and refuge-seeking.
Reviews of Travel, Space, Architecture:
‘This is truly a remarkable anthology treating the relatively untapped theme of travel and architecture. In so doing it passes from 20th century versions of the aristocratic Grand Tour, as we find these in the journals of Eldem and Le Corbusier, to the altogether more
timely anthropo-geographic reflections that comprise a wide range of subjects, from the birth of the panorama in the middle of the18th century and the analogous forms of the maritime city, to manifestations of travel and mobility in contemporary architectural practices. This radically new and critical overview assembled and carefully edited by Jilly Traganou and Miodrag Mitrašinovic provides a comprehensive way of analyzing the global trends and trajectories of contemporary architecture.’
Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture, Columbia University, USA
‘This wonderful collection explains and enacts the theoretical tensions between architecture as a discipline of emplacement and the displacement characteristic of the era of globalization. Reading architecture itself as a mobile field of disciplinary practices, the editors and the authors give us many vivid examples of the contradictions between movement and fixity in today’s human geographies and the resulting tensions between architecture and its self-image. This book will be of great interest to planners, designers, anthropologists and geographers, as well as to students of architecture.’
Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, USA
‘Travel, Space, Architecture is an inspiring collection of essays which introduces the reader to spatial intersections between architects, travellers, tourists, nomads and migrants; travelling minds and travelling bodies. The centrality of timely issues like perception, memory, identity, alterity and displacement in relation to space, challenges familiar architectural accounts based on built objects in bounded social contexts. This is a significant contribution to contemporary architectural discourse.’
Gulsum Baydar, Professor of Architecture and Chair, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey
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