The international ITA workshop will be in Krakow, Poland this year. I will not be able to join in person but I will be making a live video presentation. This year’s theme will be “ICT-supported collaboration and flexible working perceived as vehicles for stimulating local development, supporting entrepreneurship and building a fully inclusive Information Society.”

The tittle for my presentation is “What does regionalism mean today”, in this presentation I want to address the (new) meaning of regionalism today. Cities, and especially larger cities, are known due to their importance in the global economy, or due to their cultural, political or religious importance. The hierarchy and importance of a city acts as an attractor which has been the main drive for the growth of cities. A city is nothing more than a grouping of architecture, and architecture are man-made structures that support human activity. Thus initially regionalism was defined by its architecture, as architecture was the very expression of the region, not only as an expression of the activities that formed the attraction of the place, but also as the materials that were used to construct the architecture which would come directly from the regional context. Today all of this is changing. Success of a city and of a region today depends on the success of its attractors. If in the past the attraction grew slowly and depended on a hierarchical system, today the attraction can be created (almost) overnight. Think of Bilbao in Spain, the construction of the Guggenheim museum has placed this sleepy little town on the global map, or Dubai which is moving from a camel market place into a global city within a few years, or the Chinese manufacturing cities that have and are popping up like mushrooms in the Chinese countryside.