Design culture as a culture of democracy

CUIA Conference “The Culture of the Project as a Culture of Democracy” 
27.06.2025_3 p.m. - Palazzo Gravina, Naples

The CUIA (Italian University Conference of Architecture) has long animated a discussion within its Assembly and intends to share it with all colleagues and interlocutors who belong to the Italian university world, in a period of particular institutional and social tension, also due to geopolitical and environmental issues, which has led to a persistent state of polycrisis.
 

The CUIA, representing almost all university locations where the discipline of the Project in its different meanings is taught, investigated and transferred in an increasingly colloquial space between the three missions, can play an essential role in a time when Architecture and the places of its knowledge, too, need to return to authority in terms of intelligence and awareness of emerging issues, skills that even in the past have defined the qualities of a project that is increasingly contemporary because it is projected into the future.
 

Therefore, a discussion is necessary starting from the motivations that the same academic and cultural path of the three university missions, Research, Teaching and Third Mission*, must relaunch for a renewed (reformed) action of the Culture of the Project, from a cultural, political and social perspective in its complex and interdisciplinary dimension, capable of addressing current and future issues (criticalities) and emerging themes (challenges) for an open knowledge society, which increasingly calls for a democratic and ethical action of the Academy and its scientific community, animated by young researchers, faculty and students.

^{* (the set of activities aimed at promoting knowledge transfer and direct involvement of the university in civil society in order to generate cultural, economic and social value)}