Barcelona, 20.07 – 01.08 2015
Open to urban designers and researchers:
architects, engineers, sociologists, geographers, economists and Advanced Students.
Co-organized by BUILDING THE CITY NOW & IAAC
Directors
Enric Massip-Bosch (BarcelonaTECH), Olga Sezneva (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Workshop Faculty
Professors from IAAC, BarcelonaTECH, European University at Saint Petersburg, Tokyo University of Science, & Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Workshop Location
IAAC facilities, Barcelona.
Target audience
Professional architects, geographers, economists, social scientists and Advanced students
Project Location
Barcelona, Trinitat area, in the border between city and mountain.
Join a select group of international young urban designers and researchers to work on a new vision about how to think the coming future of our cities, and practice how to get ready for Transdisciplinary Urban Design Collaborative in a 2-week intense, highly personalized workshop working the basics of Open Source Urbanism in a real case-study in Barcelona.
With the support of the City of Barcelona-Urban Habitat Department.
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KEYWORDS
PROFESSIONAL LEGITIMACY // METROPOLITAN PROTOTYPING // TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
URBAN COMMONS // MULTIFOLD ECOLOGIES // DESIGN COLLABORATIVE
OPEN SOURCE URBANISM
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What is Transdisciplinary Design Collaborative?
Two contemporary processes are rapidly changing what we know about urban design, and how it is done.
Cities worldwide have entered a new era of self-awareness that will change the way they are thought, built and lived. And one of the main driving forces for this change is the increased involvement of citizens in their making, beyond the conventional levels of formalized political representation.
This social participation challenges the established roles of those professionals used to take decisions about the city. And it adds to another process taking place: the increasing complexity of all the issues about the city needs a new way of dealing with urban design, integrating sectorial knowledge into a coherent result.
But we now how the conventional role assigned to social sciences in urban design doesn’t go very far, and fails to deliver its full potential. Only through what we call Design Collaborative, in which the definition of the conceptual elements of the project is done in unison by all professionals involved while preserving each discipline field of expertise, we can bring together the best of everyone and help build better cities.
What is Open Source Urbanism?
The Modern City and the ideals it embodied have long died. Its forms of closed, rigid, technocratic spatial control have been dethroned. Now, the Contemporary City proclaims itself to be the Modern City’s open, “human”, “metabolic”, “ecologically aware” rival.
But is it?
Despite the rhetoric of openness, planning and design practices reveal a trend toward a homogeneous proliferation of ever more closed, exclusive and contrived systems. The idea of ‘Open City’ has turned into a product ready for cloning expertise, an assemblage of select and proclaimed ‘progressive’ features: International consultancies and ‘best practice’ experts are flown in to bring and apply their formulas wherever they are asked to.
Carbon pollution and obesity? –Copenhagenize by bringing in the bike! Problem with the old buildings stock? –Brusselize by re-gutting. High unemployment rates? –Revitalize with ‘creative class’ and its lifestyles. The Contemporary Open City has become a serial product built out of serial solutions. Or to put it another way: the Contemporary City becomes a program; its design a code; its openness a law.
We reject this ‘copyrighted’ Contemporary City of Control and foster a new vision: the openness of its spaces, places and arteries is a direct outcome of the open design process. Conversely, the city’s ability to create new situations from the existing structures must be captured and harnessed by its designers. ‘Openness’ in our vision informs both the process of creation and the result.
There are today a set of discrete urban practices which fall within the general concept of open-source: participatory design, urban hacking, grass-root governance, crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding, to name just a few. But they fall short when dealing with the complex and specific nature of urban design and how it has to be thought and implemented.
BARCELONA OPEN SOURCE URBANISM SUMMER STUDIO 2015 will develop a new understanding of the relationship between disciplines, between ‘planned’ and ‘hacked’, between ‘norms’ and ‘freedoms’. It will encourage professionals traditionally associated with the tasks of designing and sustaining the city to rethink their roles and to seek alliances with actors not usually seen as urban specialists, while retaining and valuing their specialized say in matters urban.
In this spirit, BOSU2015 will:
– facilitate a transdisciplinary dialogue based on a hands-on approach and the design process of a real project;
– bridge intellectual traditions of thinking information architecture and urbanism and seek their cross-pollination through concepts of commons, open-source, crowd-sourcing, material affordability and more;
– test potentials of participatory design, gorilla action, partizaning, social practice art in open-source urbanism;
– advance further the program of open-source urbanism which equally incorporates diverse and hybrid elements of the system;
– test its sustainability propositions by incorporation into the main structures of urban governance and architectural profession.
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For more information please contact:
[email protected]
Or visit:
bosu2015.blogspot.com
