HACK THE CITY – INTERSTITIAL INSERTIONS: URBAN MAPPING AND EVOLUTIONARY MORPHOLOGIES
Call Opens: 24 July 2012
Call Closes: 10 August 2012
Workshop: 14-19 August 2012
Exhibition: 18-19 August 2012
Criss-crossing our cities infrastructes are left over spaces and void spaces. What do you imagine could be developed in such spaces? What function could such spaces play within our city?
Calling all architects, desigers, artists, geographers and urban planners, we invite you to take part in the third HACK THE CITY lab. Building on Interactivos and the IdeaLab, INTERSTITIAL INSERTIONS, provides you with an opportunity to work with leading architects, geographers and urban planners, who will guide you through a process for developing ideas for such city insertions. Outcomes of the workshop will be displayed as part of the HACK THE CITY programme and the Studiolab projects.
Interstitial Insertions is a five day workshop, which focuses on enhancing and transforming the function and resilience of the city, through the creation of ideas that address liminal, in-between and left over spaces in the city.
Working with experts and academics in the fields of urban theory, sustainable architecture, ecological design and critical urban geography, selected participants will work with this team of mentors to:
1. Reflect and refine project ideas and urban interventions
2. Develop propositions that translate into workable designs
3. Unpack the discourse and critically examine the idea of the city as a complex, super-organism and system
Workshop Coordinators: Professor Greg Keeffe (Architecture - Queens University Belfast); Dr. Nick Dunn (Architecture – Manchester Metropolitan University); Dr. Alma Clavin (Geography – NUI Galway).
Workshop Information:
The city is changing: no longer is it an aesthetic creation, or purely an industrial powerhouse. It is a living, breathing super-organism, with a myriad of multiple and competing functions. As a super-organism, the future city will be defined more by its metabolism, than purely its primary function or spatial form.
What interventions would you make that could profoundly explore the idea of the city as a living organism?
What ideas would you develop to address the gaps and in-betweens spaces that are contained within our urban strucutures?
The workshop will consist of three parts:
Day 1: Team & Project Introductions & discussions on urbanity
Since the emergence of urban studies in the 1960s our concepts of the city have radically changed. The first phase of the Interstitial Insertions Workshop, will introduce novel approaches to understanding the contemporary urban situation, coupling this with a critical framework with which to splice the new ‘DNA’ of the city, as a super-organism and living body.
Teams will be lead through critical discussions and city walks, where the production of creative mappings as an instrumental way of understanding urban space and the architectural ramifications of ‘wandering’ in the city and landscape will be described and evaluated. Drawing on Guy Debord (1959) and the Situationists experiments, we are interested in critically reflecting on such approaches and their translation into geo-spatial contexts. Combining such a critical approach with ideas of evolutionary morphology, our goal is to discuss the proposed projects and evaluate what we mean by sustainable urban forms.
Day 2: Development of Project Propositions (Day 2)
Drawing on propositional research methodologies which utilise design as a method to visualise the effects of potential new interventions on a place and their influence, the second phase of the workshop will guide participants through a series of approachs which test their idea propostions. Current methods such as participatory design, practice-oriented design, service design, co-creation and human-centred design will be evaluated. An emphasis will be placed on generating scenarios, which can be used as a means for generating meaningful examples for city interventions and the relevence of up-scaling, from small-local level user innovations to larger, national and global innovations. In providing such methodological guidance, participants will be able to frame and critically evaluate their proposed projects.
Day 3-4: Emergent Interstitial Insertions (Day 3-4)
Practical hands on development of projects will continue in through Day 3 and 4, whereby projects will be encouraged through a series of site analyses, drawings, photographic studies, GPS and data models to refine their ideas and develop proposals for ‘interstital’ exhibitions.
Day 5: Preparation and Exhibition of Insertions (Day 5)
Execution and documentation of projects in the Science Gallery and HackLab and across the city.
The Interstitial Insertions Workshop Team:
Professor Greg Keeffe is Professor of Architecture at Queens University Belfast School of Architecture. He is an award-winning urban designer, who invents exciting ways of re-invigorating the city through innovative cultural, technological and sustainable interventions, which create new synergies with the existing form. His award-winning design with MacCreanor Lavington Architects for Nelson, UK was described by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment as ‘exemplary urbanism’. He is author of Urban Evolutionary Morphology (forthcoming), which propounds that the city can be seen as a super-organism, which can be adapted through a series of synthetic, genetic manipulations.
Dr. Nick Dunn is an Author and Principal Lecturer at the Manchester School of Architecture. He is co-director of the [Re_Map] unit, whose research is concerned with the mapping and representation of urban networks, data and conditions. His publications include The Ecology of the Architectural Model (Peter Lang, 2007) and the co-authored Urban Maps: Instruments of Narrative and Interpretation in the City (Ashgate, 2011). His work responds to the contemporary city as a series of systems, flows and processes, and is explored through experimentation and discourse addressing the nature of urban space: its perception, demarcation and appropriation.
Dr. Alma Clavin is an urban planner and geographer working at the School of Geography and Archaeology, NUI Galway. With a particular interest in sustainability and ecological literacy in urban environments, Alma has published research on designing for sustainable urban food growing and community resilience. Her role in Geography at NUI Galway focuses on bridging critical theoretical concerns with the ‘practice’ of knowledge in place, matching her research interests in discourses and critique of sustainable urban form. Alma will be joined by members of the planning and sustainability, and geopolitics and governmentality research clusters, NUI Galway.
Assitants: Two architectual students from Queens University, Belfast will help with project developments, visualisations and mapping exercises.
Participant Guidelines
The call is aimed at architects, artists, geographers, urbanists.
Teams (2-4 persons) as well as individuals are encouraged to apply.
Ideas should focus on addressing liminal, in-between and left over spaces in the city.
The workshop will open to between 18-24 participants.
Workshop coordinators and technical support will be available from 10-8PM for the duration of the five day workshop.
Assistance (visual design, mapping etc) will be provide for projects.
Applications to this workshop should be submitted too: teresa.dillon@sciencegallery.com by 17.00 on Aug 10th, 2012.
HACK THE CITY is kindly supported by the Department of Arts, Hertiage and the Gaeltacht, Dublin City of Science, 2012, IBM and Dublin City Council.