In this design studio, students were tasked with proposing how systems of informal placemaking and architectural activism could improve a complex urban site in Grønland, Oslo. ‘Informality’ was posed as a subject open to debate and discussion, encouraging students to develop personal positions on topics such as planning regulations, design codes, community participation, and architectural agency.

The studio included a research trip to Morocco, during which architectural and urban insights were drawn from experiencing a context rich in street life and intensified areas of trade. Divisions between ‘informality’ and ‘formality’ merged and interlaced. 

The final design brief called for ‘a task of translation’ in which students reflected on their design process and the influence their experiences in Morocco had on their design intentions. Site analysis, on-site interventions, theoretical readings and precedent studies were translated into a design strategy relevant to Oslo, Norway.

With a population of over 50 million and the continent’s largest economy, South Africa is often seen as a source of relative stability and prosperity in the region. Yet economic inequality remains high. Around 1.5 million households (approximately 7.5 million people) live in 2,700 informal settlements scattered across the country, which faces an overall shortage of 2.5 million houses. While the government’s record on housing delivery is laudable, the scale of need means informal settlements will remain for the foreseeable future. In response, authorities have slowly begun shifting the focus to incremental upgrading, including committing in 2010 to improve the quality of life of 400,000 households in well located informal settlements by 2014 through improved access to basic services and land tenure.

During Seminar Week, students traveled to Cape Town as an extension of the Urban-Think Tank Design Studio. This trip served as a critical study of the architecture, urbanism, culture, and social exchange in South Africa, with a specific emphasis on informal housing settlements. Students took part in a series of lectures and building tours by local experts in architecture, city planning, and history. The trip included tours around the surrounding landscape of the Cape Flats to build an all encompassing understanding of Cape Town. The class held community workshops with residents in the township of Masiphumelele, an apartheid created township which has recently been devastated by fire. Here students saw a variety of design approaches to the housing crisis, from government projects to bottom-up initiatives, while having an active role in the shaping of this township.

Remove / Rebuild / Respond

Teaching

How did cities develop into the cities we live in now? Which urban plans, instruments, visions, political decisions, economic reasonings, cultural inputs and social organization have been used to operate in urban settlements in specific moments of change? Which cities are exemplary in illustrating how these instruments have been implemented and how they have shaped urban environments? Can these instruments be transcribed into urban operational tools that we recognize within existing tested cases in contemporary cities across the globe?

Urban form cannot be reduced to the physical space. Cities are the result of social construction, under the influence of technologies, ecology, culture, the impact of experts and accidents. Urban unconcluded processes respond to political interests, economic pressure, cultural inclinations, along with the imagination of architects and planers and the informal powers at work in complex adaptive systems.

Current urban phenomena are the result of an urban evolution. The facts stored in urban environments include contributions from its entire lifecycle. That is true for the physical environment, but also for non-physical aspects, the imaginary city that exists along with its potentials and problems and with the conflicts that have evolved over time. Knowledge and understanding along with a critical observation of the actions and policies are necessary to understand the diversity and instability present in the contemporary city and to understand how urban form evolved to its current state.

This lecture series will introduce urban knowledge and the way it has introduced urban models and operational modes within different concrete realities, therefore shaping cities. Urban knowledge will be translated into operational tools, extracted from cities where they have been tested and become exemplary samples, most relevant for providing the understanding of how urban landscape has taken shape. Case studies will be identified to compile documents and an archive, that we use as templates to read the city and to critically reflect upon it. The presented contents are meant to serve as inspiration for positioning in future professional life as well as to provide instruments for valuable contributions and interventions.

Urban Design I/II

Urban Stories

The elective course “Action! On the Real City” develops a board game that facilitates decision-making and design processes for complex, real-life urban transformations. The course aims to explore the quantitative aspects of a sustainable approach to urban development, through the lens of various disciplines such as architecture, engineering, and environmental sciences.

Building upon an existing role-playing game, students will refine several aspects to enrich its potential as an urban analysis tool. The main focus of this semester is to create a reality-based urban quality index used to evaluate the outcomes of the game. This index will be derived from the analysis of real world case studies, quantitative models and existing indices. Students will be challenged and encouraged to draw connections between the abstract world of the board and the real world.

Tasks consist of both individual and group work: understanding the game components (such as actors, board, game pieces etc.), identifying relevant parameters constituting the urban environment, creation of a urban quality index that incorporates principles of social design and extending this index as a means of comparing global cities.

Through developing this board game, students will learn how to define common visions and justify urban planning decisions in a trans-disciplinary framework. The course will teach both systematic and creative approaches, strengthening the role of future urban designers and planners as moderators of integrated city development.

Location	KTH, Stockholm
Team	Prof. Alfredo Brillembourg & Prof. Hubert Klumpner, Helle Bendixen, Rebecca Looringh van Beeck

Making the Motherland

A Task of Translation