Urban Act: a handbook for alternative practice

Explorations in Urban Practice. Urban School Ruhr Series, 2017

Both a learning platform and a pedagogical experiment, Urban School Ruhr is built upon the foundational belief that experts and amateurs can, together, build a space of critical exchange and knowledge transfer. USR prioritises exchange and dialogue that is not necessarily attached to specific outcomes, results or interventions in built reality, instead understanding conversation as the first step to co-producing cities. Explorations in Urban Practice, the first edition in the Urban School Ruhr Series, draws from and reflects upon USR’s experiences to date whilst also looking to the future of urban practice in contemporary cities. The book presents the reader with key current questions in the field: how can we learn city making? How should we understand the political concept of commoning for this purpose? And how can we discuss intervention as a strategy for enacting urban change? With contributions from: Juan Chacón, Dirk Baecker, Merve Bedir, Pablo Calderón Salazar, Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, Silke Helfrich, George Kafka, Valentina Karga, Gilly Karjevsky, Hannes Langguth, Laura Lovatel, Torange Khonsari and Andreas Lang, Marjetica Potrc, Anna Giulia della Puppa, Julia Udall, Sam Vardy, Sabine Zahn. Published by dpr-Barcelona >> Shortlisted for the Cornish Family Prize for Art and Design Publishing at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

2014

Elke Krasny, Theresa Dillon and Rosario Talevi, Acts and Activities: Care, Repair and Recuperation.’In Make City. Stadt Anders Machen. A Compendium of Urban Alternatives, Berlin: Jovis , 2019

With contemporary urban development primarily driven by fast-paced growth and innovation imperatives there is also a pressing need to engage with longer-lasting dynamics, such as maintenance, repair, recuperation and care, in the production and reproduction of space. In this two-part interview, an epilogue to the public conversation "After the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?" 1 held during Make City Festival 2018, architect Rosario Talevi talks to urban researcher Elke Krasny and artist Teresa Dillon. They discuss the potential of architects and urbanists to act as caretakers in the ongoing recuperation of climate and communities.

city as organism. new visions for urban life 22nd ISUF International Conference|22-26 september 2015 Rome Italy, 2016

This essay presents some ideas on how to fix the disasters in European urban planning and design: how to repair Europe's damaged urban fabric. Governments have made tremendous efforts to implement solutions to problems that were obvious to everyone. Unfortunately, these solutions only exacerbate the situation, for reasons I discuss. Urbanist ideas have been applied since the 1930s that contribute to the deplorable state of urban life in many European cities. The effects of applying the 1933 Athens charter were so disastrous that a new one had to be prepared in 2003 (presented in Lisbon, not in Athens). Shamefully, the New Charter of Athens 2003 is unknown to most government planners in Europe. Time and again, politicians are seduced into constructing showcase projects that boast an alien, "contemporary" look. I also address the link between bad urban planning and ecological disaster. First published in two parts as "City of Chaos", Greekworks.com (May & June 2004), then as Chapter 20 of: Shifting Sense – Looking Back to the Future in Spatial Planning, edited by Edward Hulsbergen, Ina Klaasen & Iwan Kriens, Techne Press, Amsterdam, 2005, pages 265-280. Italian version is Chapter 10 of "No Alle Archistar", Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, Florence, 2009: pages 179-211.

2015

Keywords: collective agency ; social movements ; urbanity Reference EPFL-CHAPTER-221016 Record created on 2016-08-29, modified on 2016-10-20

The care of public spaces in urban environments has always been an indicator of a nation's welfare, impacting greatly on people's behaviours. In these terms, design of public spaces performs a political action, related to common life, because it holds people's ideals. Designers need to tell the story of how design can play a significant role in creating social change. This paper reports on the activities of an alliance of academics, designers, architects, artists and activists in the development of a public campaign to speculate on how a city might act on its present and forecast its future: Superelevata Foot[prints]. It focuses on the topic of recycling and re-use of abandoned spaces, by testing resources and chances as prerequisites of an open working process through specific tools and design practices. Is it possible to delineate a method and an innovation process by reading again these new spontaneous attitudes defined by the urgency to act? Is it possible to improve the political dimension of design action, conceiving the project as performance, as experienced in the '60 by radical groups? If design comes out from the interaction between a practice, which requests to change the state of the things, and a culture, which makes sense of this change, how do the public design activities produce culture and behavioural change? How can this culture orientate and offer common horizons to the multiplicity of practices that take place in design activities?

Cities are going through turbulent times. The social costs of the financialisation of cities became amplified with the ecomic crisis and many urban functions have lost their status as sites of welfare or cultural services, and have become calculated as potential buildable sqaure meters instead of potential contributions to life quality (Patti & Polyak, 2017). Hence, under the influence of the economic crisis, or as the consequence of political and economic instability, many communities witnessed an increasing number of built but unused and neglected spaces in their cities. With the cutback of social and cultural services and the abandonment of maintenance of those spaces, they increasingly become places of interest of the civil sector, which by self-organized activities in a certain urban areas tries to participate in urban changes.

JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM, 2014

Contemporary living is increasingly marked by different kinds of associationisms, collective but not necessarily longlasting actions, and either little or very determined communalities. This article will discuss forms of living that reject individualism and shy away from communities. Indistinct forms, based on living “side by side, walking in step” which Bauman (2002) described as “a desperate need for networking”; and Sennett (2008) said was “the force of wandering emotions shifting erratically from one target to another”. Characterised by values such as ecology, frugality, reciprocity and solidarity. We believe that the key issue is to understand whether these forms are capable, as they say they are, of metaphorically rebuilding the city. In other words, can they implement a different concept of urbanity and public space by adopting the role played in late capitalist cities by conflict, rationality, functionalism, and the market. To tackle the problem we must first understand how ...

Contemporary urban phenomena such as shrinking, sprawling, social and economic inequalities and civic unrest seem to have placed urbanism under the sign of helplessness even while it covets a position of control and power. Such matters challenge the universal and generic visions, projects and tools that shape urban design professions, while hinting at the need for establishing "a contemporary public and political platform for a renewed commitment to the city." 1 Increasingly elusive to planned urbanism -which struggles between the use of abstract tools, the implementation of somewhat utopian solutions and a more progressive theoretical line that fails to be absorbed by practice -the city and its issues are ever more real and tangible for citizens who have to cope with them in ever more creative ways. In the Balkans, social, economic and political constraints imposed on city-making processes in the communist and post-communist era have led urban planning and architecture to follow a local combination of "indiscriminate privatization and marketization; by losing their critical role in the city, they have lost the city as the constitutive subject and purpose of the profession." 2 Furthermore, "Dissatisfaction with the contemporary city has not led to the development of a credible alternative", asserted Rem Koolhaas in his essay 'Whatever Happened to Urbanism', "it has, on the contrary, inspired only more refined ways of articulating dissatisfaction. The profession persists in its fantasies, its ideology, its pretension, its illusions of involvement and control, and is therefore incapable of conceiving new modesties, partial interventions, strategic realignments, compromised positions that might influence, redirect, succeed in limited terms, regroup, begin from scratch even, but will never re-establish control." 3 Koolhaas suggests instead a "new urbanism" based on creating potential, possibilities and multiplicity, rather than one oriented towards producing order and omnipotence, new rules or limitations. Aimed at "the reinvention of psychological space" 4 rather than the permanence of the physical one, this approach establishes a keen interest for the existing city; seen not as artefact but as lived, spontaneous, informal and honest experience -the city of practices, relations and atmospheres. This brings to mind the urban exploration methods developed by Guy Debord and the French Situationist International in the 1950s: psychogeography, as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals" 5 , and the dérive, its preferred method of exploration, aimed at searching experiences and diverse ambiances risen from the interactions between unplanned urban practices and the planned city. 6 As the experienced city seems to unfold between the two,