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Amazing and magic..how movement and modern spaces can fix together, in an harmonic living and a powerful energy. freedom of spirits. let’s play.

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URBAN SPACES_a new way to project the UN-BUILT City (prt.1 Freiburg, DE)

Undoubtedly, a new way to project the city is now emerging in Europe, as demonstrate by the works of the French Atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) or by the network-group Raumlabor in Berlin. Young architects and researchers work at the intersection of architecture, city and urban planning, art and civil engagement by creating groups and collective platforms, which involve artists, students, activists and especially residents of the city themselves in urban actions, which can be called “build without architecture“. Why is the idea of building without architecture so intriguing?

We live in the era of crisis. Financial, economical, ecological, political, social and cultural turbolences result in the individual and collective apathy in the society as a whole. Apathy can’t sustain life, as different cultures and nations has experienced in the past. Certainly, a new source of individual and collective creativity is needed to provide solutions. This source could be the city: not the physical space in the first place, but rather the interaction and communication, the so called social sphere of the city. An architecture based on the principles of sustainability, cost efficient and flexibility combined with personal experiences of residents could create one strong and interconnected community or simply an alive-project.

 

 

The city of Freiburg is already a role model of progress, graces to an advanced urban planning. To maintain this story of success as one of the greatest European green city, I see the involvement of citizens and civil groups as the most crucial part during the next decade. Who know better, if not the citizens themselves, their own social and cultural needs? By using the public space as an integrative part of urban planning, the city of Freiburg could surely enhance unused potential to keep a steady level of progress, re-generating the creative sources infinite times. The capacity of the city to be in transition (and resilient) exists when the city can always change, answering in the short time to the social and cultural needs, also accepting the presence of the old urban buildings and infrastructure. So, once that the big plan is already decoded, the supervision and the support of the current state of things is to act in the small scale, in the districts, in the older built areas which cannot always bear the cost of a new public building site to renew the consent of citizens.

An urban contruction project includes at that point different scales of action. For now, the supervision and realisation of the project stays in the hands of the city planning commission. But, what if the public action can be trasformed in the action in public?

Mostly the private dimention is seen as the space of creativity and training (family, job, hobby), not the public area. To transform this unbuilt space into a space of action by the community is probably the biggest challenge of professional urban planning in the 21 century. How this process could look like?

Another scale of action is absolutely necessary and needs to be included in the planning process: public action within districts, quartiers or even singles streets. The use of technologies, like the networks, the recycling of elements, like eco-materials, and the gather of different professional skills, from the ingenieer to the gardner, can generate an open-space project, as well as an for-allspace, which doesn’t cost many money, doesn’t need solid foundations and can be replased in every moment, effortlessly. And not least, the possibility to create an open laboratory of experiences is what rappresents the step foward to make acting the cognitive research on the common living.

People can’t be trained or even forced to be creative. Creativity is communication by all means. An architect needs to communicate not only with the physical environment of the building, but rather the social one, focusing on the unbuilt space by building without architecture, to break the apathy, so future generations can prosper.