Richard Ingersoll at School of Architecture. PHOTO:

Richard Ingersoll, an architect based in Italy, gave a lecture at lecture at School of Architecture of the University of Navarra. There he lectured on Urbanism, subject which he teaches at the University of Siracusa, Florence.

"In ancient times there were no space problems, since consumption was not as high as it is today," he said. In this line he pointed out that "now we tend to have more than we need, which generates problems that have repercussions on urban spaces".

Ingersoll dedicated a large part of lecture to talk about sprawl, a term that, although it does not have an exact translation at Spanish, we can define as 'agglomeration'. During his speech he explained that most of the time we give this word a negative meaning, but that it doesn't always have to be so: "Around 50% of people live in big cities, if we don't find them beautiful, we have a problem".

He also said that we cannot really talk about "sustainable urbanism", since these two terms imply "contradictory ideas", in his words. "On the other hand, we can achieve a more sustainable urbanism than the current one," he said.

Richar Ingersoll is Professor of Italian Renaissance Architecture and Italian Urbanism at the University of Syracuse, Florence. He has also taught teaching at the universities of Ferrara, Rice, Berkeley, Zurich and the Getty Center, among others. For more than ten years he was publisher of the specialized magazine Design Book Review. He writes regularly in various media and is the author of publications such as Architecture and the World, A Cross-Cultural History of the Built Environment.