public space

Article: Critical Imagination

Bottom-up Turned Inside Out

Decision-making in urban development today isn’t defined by the needs of empowered citizens but by two mutually supporting mechanisms: big corporate interests and retreating governments. Rather than a political vision of how life in cities ought to be organized, contemporary planning resembles a managerial task that coordinates flows of money, materials, people, and information. Paradoxically, […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Military check point in the street, Kimihurura Neighborhood, Kigali, 2017.

Contemporary Urban Paranoia

Why We Should Look into the Surveillance Camera The permanent spatial state of exception in the urban environment is a much-discussed topic in postmodern discourse, yet a critical re-assessment of the contemporary situation is needed. The global proliferation of urban enclaves, and in consequence their ghettoization, indicates an urgent need for social sustainability.1 There is […]
Publication
Book cover Kto Odzyska Plac Defilad?

Kto Odzyska Plac Defilad?

In this book, published by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw on the occasion of the 9th edition of the Warsaw Under Construction Festival of Architecture Tomasz Fudala, Werner Huber, Grzegorz Mika, Michał Murawski, Ania Molenda and Cristina Ampatzidou, Artur Jerzy Filip, Marlena Happach, Magda Grabowska, Aleksandra Litorowicz, Bogna Świątkowska, and Tim Tompkins write and discuss how to turn a parking lot into an urban square, the shadow of Stalin and the Palace complex.
Article: Critical Imagination

Barbican on Solitude: a Story of Walking

‘You and one companion areaudience enough for each other,so are you for yourself.For you, let the crowd be one,and one be a crowd.’ Michel de Montaigne, On Solitude Walking is a verb that describes the body’s movement traversing a specific surface.1 It is a link between two points, a path related to a beginning and […]
Article: The Unmasters

Technology, Creativity and the future of Cities

Christopher Lindinger, co-director of Ars Electronica Futurelab, talks about the creative lab culture that forms his working environment, shares his thoughts on group dynamics and organizational structures, and reflects on the potential and challenges of technological development for the future of cities and their inhabitants. CA: What is the Ars Electronica Futurelab, and what does […]
Article: The Unmasters

The Unobvious Ways of City Making

ZUS merges the theoretical and practical aspects of what we today call city making, yet they are also a design office for architecture and urbanism. Together with ZUS principal, Kristian Koreman, we discussed the ways they combine the two, how it was to be at the forefront of emerging unsolicited architecture and what do they […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

The Art Living Project

For those who have never experienced homelessness first hand, it is hard to relate to those without a roof over their heads. Huge programs have been rolled out to take these people out of sight, either by criminalising or victimising them. With a rhetoric of individual responsibility prevailing, taking them out of mind is also […]
Article: The Unmasters
Let us keep our own noon_2013_David Horvitz

No one owns the beach: On time and public space on and offline

AM: Could you tell us something about your latest projects? DH: Recently I have been thinking a lot about different ideas of time and its standardization. I have realized a few projects related to time zones and time distribution. In one of them I melted an old bell; in another I moved the border of […]
Article: The Unmasters
Mark van der Net - Amsterdam

Fewer Regulations, More Open Source and a Broader View

This is what Mark van der Net thinks can uncover new perspectives for architecture and urban planning. CA: Mark, you created OSCity – a free online platform that combines cutting-edge technology, open source and spatial planning. Can you briefly explain what it is and how it started? MvdN: It started about two years ago. Around […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Public Anagrams

Public Anagrams is based on the manipulation and subversion of mainstream slogans describing well-known public art and urban development paradigms and strategies, such as “smart cities” or “urban regeneration”. By mixing up letters and by turning upside-down the slogans, the artist aims at raising critical awareness about the hidden outcomes of urban development strategies. Slogans […]
Research

Possibility Space

Over Hundred Years of Transformations in Six European Squares Possibility Space: Over Hundred Years of Transformation in Six European Squares was a research project commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw for the 9th edition of the Warsaw Under Construction Architecture Festival, presented at the Palace of Culture in 2017. This research and […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Active Public Space, Plaça de les Glòries

Our relationship with machines in the digitized space is usually rather inconspicuous. All sorts of devices surround and track us without us knowing that they are there. Active Public Space is a project that imagines transformation of underutilised public spaces, in this case Plaça de les Glòries in Barcelona, and speculating on its future use […]
Article: Wishful Thinking

Friction Atlas

Everyday, citizens perform, on public surfaces, synchronised routines of elaborate moves. As we move across the city, laws define movements and gestures, unconscious reactions, behaviours and anticipations. They are sets of instructions, conditional statements, ultimately incorporating power; a structural force that plays into everyday life. What happens when we redefine the rules as the visible […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Bersih 4: Street Protests as a Form of City Making

Cities and architecture are not devoid of politics. Produced and governed through political processes, they often become the canvas upon which power is mapped. But this can also backfire. A square, designed to provide the setting for showing off the architectural grandeur of an institution, often becomes the very place where the populace gathers to […]
Article: Critical Imagination

Urban Branding and the Violent Ghosts of the Politics of Representation

City branding is a relevant issue among urban policy makers. In a nutshell, it refers to the promotion of the image of a city, mostly in order to attract tourists, investments, mega-events, such as the Olympic games, and new wealthy residents, such as the members of the so-called ‘creative class’.1 This commentary will summarize some […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
Giuseppe Licari - Wild Gold

Wild Gold

Nature is violently ostracized from the city. Parks are meant to substitute our need for natural presence, but their existence only makes it evident that everything in the city needs to be curated. Even nature. Escaping the control and exploitation of civilization, abandoned areas, transitional and inaccessible places, form what Gilles Clement calls the Third […]
Article: Wishful Thinking
Borders - Ania Ruminska - 2014

Borders

The red-white border brutally cuts through the landscape on the premise of protecting cyclists on a path that meanders for its largest part right in the middle of nowhere. Protecting from what? – one might ask. Perhaps from forgetting that they have left the city and the rule of order that reigns there. To what […]
Article: Critical Imagination
Esto no es un Solar - This is not an urban plot

This is not an Urban Plot

Recent conditions of the construction crisis and widespread recession have led us to believe that we live in an era of not only strict economic restrictions and austerity but also unavoidably, in an age of an irrefutable decreasing of resources. As Jeremy Till states in his essay ‘Scarcity contra Austerity’, the strictness of this reduction […]