In discussions on urbanism, the need to involve new actors has
been a major theme of recent debate. In this field, throughout
Europe, various ways of allowing citizens to take a more direct part
in planning is stressed. It is also important to look at the role or
lack of role played by particular research fields. Architecture plays
a major role in city planning. While archaeology has become
increasingly involved in field projects in urban environments, the
discipline seldom plays an important role in city planning.
In several countries and particular cities this situation has been
questioned during the last decades.

In Sweden, certain studies indicate an increased interest in an
active involvement of archaeology from the part of individual
municipalities and provincial governments, and even on the state
level in certain cases.

In France, Lavendhomme at Inrap has discussed various possible
new kinds of uses of archaeology in the planning process, and
similar discussions start to appear in other countries. In the UK,
archaeologists are increasingly involved in mitigating heritage
impacts of building projects at the design stage rather than during
construction (excavating).

To take just one example, in Sweden the archaeologist Stefan
Larsson has developed a project with the municipality of Kalmar,
in which city planners, architects and archaeologists collaborate in
making suggestions for a city plan in a segment of the city.
In this workshop we will focus on possible new ways of
collaboration between architects and archaeologists. We wish to
open a new kind of communication between these research fields
and related praxis.

The possible contributions from archaeology include questions of
conservation, diffusion of archaeological knowledge by different
means, but also other fields, including practical knowledge on the
development of particular districts over time, general knowledge in
comparative studies of urbanism, questions of design or questions
of “gestalt” in urban settings, and the intersections between
archaeology, architecture and public art.

We hope this workshop will help to open this field, and that it will
be followed by other scholarly meetings on more limited particular
cases and questions and, potentially, by a larger conference
building on the workshop’s outcomes.