劳伦斯?威尔 教授 演讲概要：

Capital cities, by definition, need to both house and represent the seat of government and other ‘national’ institutions. The act of designing a new capital city?or building significant new ‘national’ institutions in an existing capital city?forces an engagement with these questions of national representation. Wherever sovereignty is contested, the societal fissures are made visible by the ways that sovereign leaders attempt to define and construct ‘national’ places. In a pluralist nation-state, multiple social identities may potentially get constructed through architecture and urban design, and some groups may see themselves as represented much more so than others in what gets built to represent supposedly national institutions. 

In this talk, drawing on examples from six continents, Prof. Vale attempts to argue three things:  First, a wide variety of regimes have used urban design and architecture to advance a nationalist agenda, yielding a “design politics” operates at all visible scales. Second, when such regimes give in to the temptations of nationalism, the results are usually very divisive. Finally, however, he suggests that it is possible to imagine ways that architecture and urban design can be used to heal political rifts, rather than exacerbate them.

Prof. Vale discusses four principal forms nationalist temptation: the temptations of sub-nationalism, invented history, display, and isolation. These are not the only spatial manifestations of political machinations, but they do seem to appear with particular frequency in the constructed landscapes of post-colonial governance. Conversely, the talk concludes with examples of cases where architecture and urban design have been used to repair cities, rather than divide them.