The third opening «TEMPORAL PORTALS: URBAN SPACES» at the Generative Centre in Lugano brought together thinkers, researchers, local government representatives and urban enthusiasts to explore the vital intersection of temporality and urbanity through the lens of the Nominute.City research initiative. The event offered a rich tapestry of ideas that explored how cities function as repositories of collective narratives while evolving through different temporal experiences.
The atmospheric space of the Generative Center welcomed participants on a late sunny afternoon, providing an intimate setting for dialogue. The event featured Dr. Isabella Pasqualini, Prof. Dr. Axel Vogelsang from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Jan Trautmann, Director of the Lugano Living Lab, and Dr. Jan A. Eckert, Founder and Principal Investigator of the Nominute.City research initiative. Each contributed a unique perspective, skilfully moderated by Felix A. Bachmann-Quadros, co-founder of the Generative Center.
First Session
The first session explored how places are both shaped by existing narratives and have the power to unfold new ones across cultural and generational boundaries. Jan Eckert presented Nominute.City’s approach to understanding urban temporality through a lens of sensemaking, quoting Nancy Huston from her book L’espèce fabulatrice: «L’univers com tel n’a pas de Sens. Il est silence. (…) Le Sens dépend de l’humain, et l’humain dépend du Sens» (The universe as such has no Meaning. It is silence. (…) Meaning depends on the human, and the human depends on Meaning). This first insight led to the conclusion that we can study urban spaces through different levels of sensemaking, specifically through three distinct dimensions:
– The lived space: sensemaking through direct lived experience and embodied interaction
– The perceived space: sensemaking through the processing of sensory input and environmental cues
– The conceived space: sensemaking through shared culture, collective memory, and social narratives
In concluding his introduction, Jan Eckert emphasised how Nominute.City departs from post-growth scenarios that prioritise care over exploitation, conviviality over competition, culture over commodification, sharing over privatisation, and human well-being and planetary health over efficiency. His conclusion was anchored in Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the «urban oeuvre», which defines urban space as collective action that creates space-time commons.
Case Study: Lugano
During the following dialogue, Lugano emerged as an ideal case study – a city where Swiss, Italian and global influences create a unique cultural landscape. Participants noted how Lugano’s identity is continually shaped by interacting narratives: its history as a financial centre, its role as a bridge between northern and southern European cultures, and its emerging identity as a technological centre of innovation. These narratives don’t just coexist, but interact dynamically, influencing both urban development and the experience of citizens. For instance, the tension between Lugano’s traditional banking heritage and its aspirations as a blockchain hub creates productive friction that reshapes both the physical and cultural landscape of the city.
A lively discussion emerged around urban governance – whether municipalities have the necessary insights into the layer of «lived place» to envision future urban narratives, how technology can be either a helpful platform or another amplifier of neoliberal threats leading to further privatisation of public space, and how citizens can gain agency in co-authoring urban commons. Axel Vogelsang shared insights from his experience of co-operative housing, highlighting the investment of time and energy required for meaningful participation.
On the other hand, sometimes agency comes from the bottom up and the dream of something new. Examples in Swiss urbanism include the reuse of the former football stadium in Biel/Bienne, which led to the concept of temporary use called «Terrain Gurzelen», or the initiatives that emerged in Lugano itself, led by the Associazione IDRA, which held its discussion on more available spaces for independent culture in Lugano just the day after our dialogue at the Generative Center.
The (forgotten) Power of Dreaming
Swiss sociologist Jean Odermatt expanded on the conversation about «dreaming» future urban narratives. While industrialised societies often relegate dreaming to unproductive realms—viewing them as mere escapes from reality rather than generative practices—participants explored Gaston Bachelard’s concept of «reverie» and «spatial poetics». This performative dimension of dreaming is also linked to the work of anthropologist Nastassja Martin, who distinguishes between «projective» and «performative» dreams in her recent book «In the East of Dreams», recalling Artemidorus Daldianus’s ancient distinction between stress-induced dreams (enhypmia) and transcendental dreams that reveal unknown futures (oneiroi).
Martin’s research with the Even people of Kamchatka reveals the performative and animistic dimension of dreaming, where people encounter animals in their dreams who provide guidance. One Even woman’s comment on Martin’s own dreams – «You didn’t go anywhere, you didn’t meet anyone» – highlights Western culture’s disconnection from the access to the unconscious that performative dreaming provides.
Unfolding Diversity
During the break, conversations flowed organically as participants shared their perspectives on the ideas presented. The diversity of the audience – students, professionals, local government officials and citizens – enriched the discussions, while the Generative Centre’s welcoming atmosphere and refreshments facilitated meaningful exchanges. This meeting demonstrated how, even today, physical encounters open up space for diverse dialogues on issues that affect everyone – just as most of us live in an urban environment that is constantly being renegotiated and reimagined through different narratives.
Second Session
The second session began with a very interesting insight into the reflections of Isabella Pasqualini, who offered a fascinating perspective on the neuroscience of place perception, explaining how our brains process and make sense of physical environments. At the same time, she highlighted how trying to reconstruct the highly dynamic connections of our human brains leads to a Promethean approach, believing that technology can solve and rebuild what nature has developed over thousands of years – often resulting in solutions that require far more resources, such as computing power, than nature’s organic solutions. This perspective led the discussion into questions about the infinite hope that technology can provide the «deus ex machina» solution to today’s complex and interdependent challenges, and the notion of utopia – the «dreamed» place to design and live in.
As a result, the dialogue shifted to the importance of place in the equation of human dreams, necessary resources and an ecosystem that is at the crossroads of organic evolution and human sensemaking. Henri Lefebvre, quoted during the first session, writes in his famous text «Right to the City» that this kind of sensemaking is defined by «… isotopies at each level: political, religious, commercial space, etc. In relation to these isotopies, other levels are revealed as heterotopies. Meanwhile, at each level, spatial oppositions are revealed that enter into this relationship of isotopy-heterotopy». With his notion of isotopies and heterotopies, Lefebvre refers to Michel Foucault’s definition of the «in-between spaces», which he calls heterotopies, created by human desires and actions. One of the archetypes of Foucault’s heterotopias, for example, is the garden, which, according to French landscape architect Gilles Clément, lies at the intersection of the human dream and the evolutionary forces of nature.
From there, participants considered the emergence of human society itself, with the first settlers organising space in the Céide Fields of north-west Ireland, a Celtic field system dating back to around 3500 BC. This ancient example resonates powerfully with Nominute.City’s vision, as it demonstrates indigenous and pre-capitalist wisdom about land stewardship within extremely constrained ecological conditions—where settlers had to carefully manage just a dozen inches of bog for crops and livestock. The Céide Fields thus serve as a historical anchor for contemporary discussions about resource limits, climate resilience, and post-efficiency thinking in urban design.
Ancestral Wisdom
This throwback in human history gave way to a discussion of how our minds are still tied to bodies that have evolved over thousands of years. While AI today offers us ways to access generative knowledge that is decoupled from this physicality, people living in socio-urban networks are still somehow linked to ancestral behavioural patterns and needs, as Jan Trautmann, director of the Lugano Living Lab, rightly pointed out during the discussion.
It is now up to us to negotiate and decide how much of this ancestral heritage can be part of post-growth urbanism, and how much is still embedded in the narratives that drive the places we live in. At the same time, questions arise about «lost» wisdom that needs to be recovered from previous generations, and how technology might be a key to this intergenerational knowledge transfer and storytelling.
Adding up the layers as described by Jan Eckert during the first session, a new «layer cake» emerges at the end of the second session: «topos-isotopy-heterotopy-utopia» seem to represent the connection of physical, embodied and lived space that is constantly renegotiated with meaning, transformed by action and driven by our dreams and utopias. All in all, a magnificent canvas for storytelling and narrative – which, according to Nancy Huston, is the essence of our species of «storytellers».
This third opening, organised by the Generative Centre in Lugano in collaboration with xocolat.org, hortopia.org, nominute.city and luganolivinglab.ch, was a truly insightful experience. It demonstrated that even in our hyper-connected age, physical gatherings still have a unique power to spark dialogue that goes beyond «prompting chats» and generates ideas – even dreams – capable of transforming our mindsets, physical environments and technological ecosystems, potentially writing a new chapter in humanity’s history of living in harmony with nature.
As participants left the venue, Joseph Campbell’s profound insight lingered in the air: «You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere.» Perhaps this captures the essence of what Nominute.City seeks to understand – how each of us exists at the centre of our own urban experience, while simultaneously participating in a collective narrative that transcends individual perception. In this understanding may lie the key to creating urban environments that truly serve both human flourishing and planetary wellbeing.
For those interested in continuing these conversations or participating in future Nominute.City events, we invite you to follow the initiative’s development at nominute.city or check the Generative Centre’s communication channels for upcoming gatherings that further explore the intersection of urban design, temporality and collective storytelling.