Cities within Cities - Negotiating Cultural Density

Abstract

How can we re-imagine ordinary neighbourhoods through strategically engaging and intensifying their creative potential, embracing their identity, traditions, rituals, the arts and cultural events? Students are introduced to case studies from the urban lecture series, design methods and tools for densification of city blocks and streetscapes, imagining growth processes for Cities within Cities.

Objective

Students will emerge in our chair’s “method-design” to develop their prototypical design on an urban and architectural scale. They will be guided to identify, map and develop networks of stakeholders, translate their demands and resources into scenarios for development and design evidence-based project interventions. Urban Design prototypes are the synthesis of this process on different scales, framed by a narrative that is consequentially visualized and communicated in analog and digital graphic representations.

Content

Invited by the city, our studio is demonstrating how our method of incremental upgrades empowers social- and urban development as a design-strategy, translating benefits into the communities. Alternative approaches and tactics are particular to each city, and the cultural context needs to be understood and mapped. We are going to look at references, and tools drawn from our Urban-Stories Lecture Series. We are looking at Migrant neighbourhoods, Urban-Villages, and Townships. The concepts drawn from diverse contexts are then tested in the neighbourhood of Barrio Abajo in Colombia, which is at the heart of the UNESCO world heritage Carnival. With existing and new technological and cultural infrastructures, we are developing our goal, densifying land use, buildings, public spaces, programs and opportunities. Special attention will be given to housing and workplaces along with their demands on daylight, shadow, air, and accessibility. We are collaborating with SECO (Switzerland), WEF innovation districts initiative, Agenda 2030, and the SDG’s driving Colombian Cities. COVID 19 realities have impacted on how cities will work and sustain themselves in future. Returning to smaller entities of functional city on neighbourhood scale, the establishment of localised need and supply chains are necessary. Densification requires to be redefined in relation to autonomous systems, decentralisation, mobility, healthy living environments and social sustainability. Measures of pioneering solutions and step-by-step processes that are accessible for the local sectors of the population in the popular neighbourhood of Barrio Abajo, Barranquilla, Colombia are essential for a better understanding of urban design processes, pilots for urban-design, architectural projects in public spaces, and buildings that create direct links to economic improvements. Moreover, multi-stakeholders from civil society, public offices, or investors need to align better in a multi-sectoral perspective with varied expectations to deliver architecture for change. Many international design and consulting firms (Arup, BIG, OA) are transforming the city, along with the wealthy north by adding museums, conference centers, shopping malls. At the heart of all this lies Barrio Abajo, a rebellious 80 ha neighbourhood, where people own their land, are resistant against being included in short term investor models, because of concerns of gentrification and displacement. The emergence of a government innovation district programs embracing the digital revolution provides drivers on the economic and political agenda of smaller concrete prototypical projects to scale-up along with the events around the annual celebration of the carnival. The project transforms the environmental, social, and economic challenges based on the contemporary condition of the Barrio Abajo in Barranquilla. The village or “Barrio” is low-income, but not poor, full of opportunities, not problems. We like to place the current population into an integrated development frame and propose to make the benefits of the increased value of this central area of the city, the association between nature, culture, climate a benefit for the current inhabitants of the Barrio. Evidence-based urban planning and design informs better development, increases density, and exemplary governance. The implementation of typological models of urban design strategies, for blocks and streets, and a design decision-making environment will enable sustainable and resilient integrated planning and urban design solutions for the physical and non-physical (program and people) environment in the Barrio Abajo. Special attention will be given to the conceptual and transferable potentials to other Barrios in Barranquilla as well as other cities along the coast, Santa Marta, Cartagena, amongst others. The potential for entrepreneurship and bottom-up meeting top-down value chains can be provided by moderation and initiation through knowledge.

Resources