A different perspective on architectural design: bottom up participative experiences

Abstract

The weight of the financial and real estate components in the present crisis, and their impact on millions of people give a renewed importance to the right to housing and the wider right to the city. The paper of architects in planning the city is also changing due to new social relations and the empowerment of citizens, and we have not to forget that scarcity is a great impulse for social and technical innovation, among them architecture. Henry Lefebvre’s “The right to the city” (Lefebvre 1968), can be considered the starting point for the understanding and reconnaissance of the right to urban life, transformed and renewed (Paquot 2012). At the present moment, the idea is growing that to change the life would be necessary to change the city, and the same concept of “right to the city” should be filled with new contents. In this paper we are not interested in the already widely analysed contemporary city, at the base of the exponentially urban growth of the last century, but in what is left in-between: in the places where contemporary flows - economic, migration and IT - move to reach the cities, the non-places (Augé 1995). The interest is now focused in these satellites hubs, so that everything in-between is not considered at all. These voids are anyway really important, and as they are the spot where this workshop is reflecting,it may be interesting deepening more first from an historical point of view, and then observing contemporary experiences dealing with the threats and opportunities they offer.