Urban Fabrication / Making Collective Infrastructures

Useful information

Team members: Zoe Tzika
Country: Spain
Keywords: #fabrication #commons #urban_space #collective_process #circularity #self-sufficiency #resilience #tactical_urbanism

Short Description

Productive perspectives for alternative urban futures

Detailed Description

The notion of Urban Fabrications is presented as an interpretive frame for understanding emergent urban design experiments in contemporary cities. Stimulating theoretical and practical experimentation regarding possible future pathways of urban design intervention, as a means to promote social participation in the conception and appropriation of urban space.

The project explores how we can make more resilient neighbourhoods with the participation of the local communities. It experiments with the materiality & the energy of the urban ecosystem, in an inter-scale approach in order to understand how we can create circularity and self-sufficiency. By making collective, bottom-up infrastructures people can actively shape their environment and their everyday lives.

Project Details

Does your design take social and cultural challenges and human wellbeing into consideration?: The project explores how the capacities of architecture and urban design can be remobilized as tools of empowerment for the users of the space, enabling them to occupy and appropriate the urban, continually to transforming it, and thus to produce a different city than anyone could have dreamt up in advance.

Does your design support sustainable production, embodying circular or regenerative design practices?: The project explores an urban growth trajectory that is not based on the extractivism and the exploitation of resources but on the circularity and the reuse of materials and structures. It proposes new bio-based materials, non-energy intensive, low-carbon and reusable. This is achieved by incorporating and optimizing recycled materials, thereby reducing consumption of natural raw materials, water, and energy, resulting in a more sustainable construction material.

Does your design use principles of distribution and open source?: The process explores how we can create nodes of decentralized decision making in the neighborhoods, self-managed that are promoting collectivism and participation. Also, it explores toold, practices and materials in an open-source way, in order to be interpreted and further developed by local communities.

Does your design promote awareness of responsible design and consumption?: The project tries to break the loop of non-sustainable development and it qustions the consumerist way of producing the cities.