Excursion 11 April 2023
Field trip to Design-Build and participatory urban development projects Buenos Aires, San Martin
Research Workshop 12 April 2023
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page 15
Presentation and discussion of transdisciplinary research projects and real world labs Institute of Urbanism ISU, FADU-UBA
International Conference 13 April 2023
Hand-over of Gropius Chair from Prof. Markus Vogl to Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich
Presentation and panel discussion of international approaches to tackle sustainable urban development for the Pluriverse by crossing hemispheres, disciplines, and the realms of academia and practice
Launch of the dossier ‘ACROSS’ in ‘scape the international magazine of landscape architecture and urbanism #19/ 2023
Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism FADU, UBA
Synthesis
Identified research interests, experiences and infrastructure by the invited experts from Argentina, Chile, Germany and Sweden, across academia and practice, in the field of architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture
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Network creation
Research themes // Research funders // Networks and consortia // Research applications
Network profile
Members // Topics // Methods // Sites // Funders // Goals // Activities
Across the road, across the river, across the ocean, across the universe: we travel ‘across’ to learn and grow, to understand new ways of conceptualising reality. Crossing always entails a risk, a leap of faith that involves the role of chance, it supposes transformation, adaptation, and change, the need to understand alternative dimensions of culture and space.
In an era approached as the Anthropocene, a time of multiple human-induced crises, imagining and building urban futures requires thinking differently, moving forward, reinventing reality. Others have done so in other moments of crisis, such as the German architect Walter Gropius, inspiring professionals around him in his time, and encouraging those who conceive urban spaces today, to cross the lines of ‘business as usual’ again.
Architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture are long-established professions and academic disciplines. They research, teach and create urban futures alike, and the dividing line between practice and academia does not matter. Students in these disciplines are taught in the studio and in the field. Research is conducted in libraries and urban laboratories. Lessons cross professional and disciplinary boundaries, knowledge transfer turns transdisciplinary. And as Gropius in his time, today’s researchers and professionals in the design disciplines can make such knowledge travel between hemispheres, for example between Europe and the Americas. Most importantly, they can help it travel both ways, not only from North to South. Today, urban futures need multidirectional thinking and acting, and a ‘pluriversal’ understanding of design and knowledge, according to the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar. And where else than in the urban space, with all its complexities, would professionals and scholars make better sense of the 'pluriverse' as a world made of many worlds, composed of many hands, conceived by many souls, together.
This report relates the main instances and take-aways of the international symposium and conference ‘ACROSS – pluriversal urban futures’, arranged from 11-13 April 2023 by the Walter Gropius Chair at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism of the University of Buenos Aires. Experts from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Sweden and Germany discussed how to join forces across hemisferes, across disciplines, and across the academy and civil society, to shape educational programmes and research projects with the intent to counter global threats site-specifically and multi-vocally, through design. Pluriversal design for urban spaces leaves behind the traditional modernistic conception of (mostly male) masterminds creating glamorous architectural objects on the tabula rasa of (purposely cleared) urban sites. Instead, site-responsive design in the current epoch adopts a posture of design as transformation, in accepting to work with that which already exists, without wasting resources, and in collaboration with many actors locally and globally.
During the first day of the symposium, outgoing Gropius Chair director Prof. Markus Vogl guided international researchers and students to the pilot projects of the Biblioteca Popular La Carcova in San Martin and to the Villa 20-Barrio Papa San Francisco neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires’ Comuna 8, which he, his team and his students from various international and disciplinary backgrounds have helped shaping in cooperation with local stakeholders and international foundations. These projects showcase the value of co-designed and co-produced urban districts which emerge from informal settlements.
During the second symposium day, incoming the Gropius Chair director Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich invited selected experts from Latin America and Europe to identify critical topics for pluriversal research and education. The design of urban neighbourhoods proved to stand central, be it in Latin America or in Europe, with architectural, urbanistic, landscape and governance issues best being grasped from a pluriversal design perspective – transscalar, transareal, transdisciplinary.
During the third symposium day, the Gropius Chair directors and the international guests presented these topics in a public conference at FADU-UBA, setting the stage for further profiling the Gropius Chair as a critical resource for launching experimental research and education for the next generation of pluriversal designers to face the challenges of the 21st century urban space.
Excursion 11 April 2023
ACROSS Excursion 11 April 2023
Field trip to Design-Build and participatory urban development projects
Buenos Aires, San Martin
// led by Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Markus Vogl, Gropius Chair 2017-2022
// Participants
Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Markus Vogl, Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich, Valentina Gertiser (Gropius assistant), Sofia Videla (Gropius assistant), Harald Klein (Lecturer SLU Malmö), Ture Askwall (MSc student SLU), Rasmus Peterhans (MSc student SLU), Medina Diedrich (BSc student HU Berlin), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Renato d’Alençon, Prof. Dr. Paola Alfaro d’Alençon with 5 students (Universidad Católica, Santiago de Chile)
// Architecture as social design
// Common learnings
//The excursion group met Waldemar Cubilla, Gisela Perez and the Popular Library team at the site. It could be experienced how the space works and hear how the process of community-building is at this common. The library has a bottom up approach, it started led by Waldemar and the organized neighbours, the project was developed with UNSAM students that helped them design and build what they needed. It is a small intervention that generates a synergy for a transformation of the specific site and its surroundings. Waldemar talks about “books as landscape” and another outstanding phrase for him was that “love is built through the landscape” making allusion to the landscape transformation of the site, where there was a dump they created an open green area and a library, being nature and education two key elements that the place lacked before.
// Foundation: 2012
// Landowner: CIMET S.A who cedes it to the municipality and this cedes it to organized residents for 20 years on loan. Little connection with the owners, except for a project that is in process that has as its objective that the workers of this company finish high school.
// History: Waldemar Cubilla is the founder of the library, he has been in prison for some time and there he discovered special things in books: they could give him knowledge and new opportunities. There he also studied sociology and when he went back to his neighbourhood he decided to create a library for the people there, at first there was scepticism about this idea but with time people started to see the new possibilities that this could bring them.
// Present: “Carcova as a bridge” La Carcova Popular Library is not just a library, it is an educational center for the neighbours where they help people finish school, they help them with university studies and also have an educative and caring space for children. There they also teach crafts to the neighbours, Sergio Benites participates in this and also in the construction of the site that is still in process. The center is a place where they have the possibility to work with the issues that impact the neighbourhood in various aspects: social, emotional and economical. They give them tools so that they can work and get their economy on track. they give a space where they can socialize and also a space where they can be contained emotionally. An example of the last point mentioned is the workshop they make
treating abuse and gender violence in the neighbourhood that sadly affects many children and women in La Carcova. In this kind of workshops, there is also a bottom-up approach where the neighbours who are interested participate in the creation of different methods on how to cope with this situation. In the last image below we can see for example a map the neighbours created of the emergency network they should recur to in an abuse or gender violence episode, for example, they marked where the hospitals and the police station were between other relevant spots and then they will make a clean copy with a protocol to follow and contain the victim in order to share that knowledge in posters and other media along the neighbourhood.
// Future: There are various challenges they face, for example the difficulty in accessing BID (Inter-American Development Bank) financing due to a matter of commodatum papers that have not yet been defined.
There are other projects they plan to do such as a hybrid space, a business with a cafe, community gardens, completing space for children. Mixed and complementary uses, being able to open throughout the day, formalize their employees.
// Collaborations: FADU, UBA, UNSAM, CONABIP (Comisión Nacional de Bibliotecas Populares), Municipality of San Martin (local scale), Social Development Ministry (national scale), Gropius Chair, Ministry of Community Development (provincial scale), reconquista natural reserve and private companies.
13:00h / Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, UNSAM, Campus Miguelete, San Martín
// work and teach in the territory
// Gustavo Dieguez, Lucas Gilardi, Roberto Busnelli
//History: The UNSAM is a public university located in the municipality of San Martin, in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. The university was founded in 1992, with the idea of decentralising the academic system of Buenos Aires City, with the UBA. In 1994, with the sale of Ferrocarril Mitre to private capitals, part of the land used for train infrastructure was handed over to the UNSAM. The preexistent infrastructure was improved and re-functionalized to open the first classrooms, library and laboratories.
//Present: The university authorities have the idea that practice and theory must come together and that the knowledge has to be produced by experimentation within the territory of the university. Furthermore, the university embraces the idea of collaboration between public and private actors and the idea of learning through practice and 1:1 interventions. In this direction, the university develops prototypes, investigates new materials, from the recycling of materials or the use of discards from other industries. Companies that usually market these products or belong to the industry finance these investigations. Moreover, the institution shares classrooms and laboratories in a way they can be used for university as well as trade training courses, encouraging collaboration between these different learning processes.
//Future: The vision of the university as a laboratory mastermind of new products for use in the real world, patenting discoveries, and an active part of the country’s economy, without forgetting the local and social needs, being one of the main driving forces of these projects development.
14:00 – 16:00h / Villa 20 and Papa Francisco Neighborhood, Commune 8
// participatory processes in the process of urban transformation
// Dr. Martín Motta, IVC team
The last place to visit was Barrio 20, where the excursion group met Tomás Reverter, a referent of the Instituto de la Vivienda de la Ciudad (IVC), an institution that has been working in the process of ‘re-urbanization’ of informal neighborhoods.
// History: IVC, former ‘Comisión Municipal de la Vivienda’, was a decentralized and autonomous agency created in 1967 to promote social housing in the city of Buenos Aires and inside the province as well. With the approval of law 5705 of urban and social integration of informal and popular neighborhoods in the City of Buenos Aires, the IVC was put in charge of these transformations in several neighborhoods such as Barrio 20, Barrio 21, Asentamiento Fraga, Barrio Rodrigo Bueno.
// Present: This ongoing project involves three main strategies that are the opening of streets that connect the neighborhood with the formal city, the improvement of existing houses and ‘swelling’ of blocks (generating patios for lighting and ventilation of houses), and the building of new housing blocks. What is interesting about the work of this public institution is that these strategies can only take place with the agreement of the neighbors, after discussion meetings at ‘mesas vecinales’ (neighborhood meetings), and no inhabitant of the barrio can be evicted or forced by the police to leave their house. By the time being, almost all of the planned streets have been opened, and the housing units conforming the Papa Francisco Neighborhood are done. The biggest challenge for the moment is to move forward to the ‘swelling’ of blocks, adapting the informal constructions to the formal city normative of habitability, at the same time they generate new normative, created from the unique conditions of these neighborhoods.
// Future: Create new kinds of associations with research teams from Germany, with the main goal of improving the landscape of the neighborhood. With the opened streets, the next step would be to think about the urban natural environment and how it can be developed and improved, in the context of polluted soil. They are planning to do prototypes of urban gardens to test them and analyze how the environment can be improved and how the neighbors can engage with them.
Presentation and discussion of transdisciplinary research projects and real world labs Institute of Urbanism ISU, FADU-UBA
// in collaboration with Lestard Cajide Janches LCJ Chair
// led by Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich, Gropius Chair 2023 –
// Participants: Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich, Prof. Dr. Flavio Janches, Adj. Prof. Max Rohm, Prof. Adj. Maria Jesus Huarte, Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Markus Vogl, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Renato d'Alençon, – Dr. Caroline Dahl, MSc Harald Klein, Prof. Ing. Juan Carriquiry, Prof. Dr. Paola Alfaro d'Alençon, Arq. Valentina Gertiser, Arq. Sofia Videla.
Invited research workshop at ISU, FADU-UBA
10.00h-16.00h / Case study presentations & funding frameworks
// THEMES – scouting out common interests: public space, residential districts, mobility, post-industrial transformation, climate adaptation, new planning procedures, co-design
// CALLS – topical themes proposed by funders
// FORMATS – capacity building, design-build, real world labs, comparative research
// SITES – in Argentina, Chile, Germany, Sweden
// PARTNERS – academic and non-academic
// INTRODUCTION – Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich, Gropius Chair
// Villa Tranquilla /PLAYSPACE Foundation, The Netherlands, and Rio Reconquista/ PDE FADU-UBA
Prof. Dr. Flavio Janches and Adj. Prof. Max Rohm, LCJ Chair, FADU UBA, Argentina
Transdisciplinary project which involved academic and research experience and the development of public space in Villa Tranquila, an informal settlement in the Barracas neighborhood, in the south of the city of Buenos Aires.
• A participatory process that included interviews with local residents, informal chats, several excursions to the site, site investigations, and mapping done by university students.
• Potential areas for intervention were defined by mapping the daily paths and timelines of residents.
• The bottom-up approach, starting from a small urban intervention could start a bigger process of transformation, and generate a network of public spaces with different scales and connective capacities.
• Attach new interventions to preexisting places of significance for the neighbours and existing institutions, such as libraries, schools, sports clubs, and resignify marginal areas such as dumpsters.
Prof. Adj. Maria Jesus Huarte, MLDND Chair, FADU UBA, Argentina
• A transdisciplinary exercise, combining education, research architecture, and art, developed in the green area of the Faculty of Agronomy.
• The process of transformation of an educational cluster into a public park.
• A bottom-up process that included walks through the productive area of the school and mapping with students from architecture and from the agriculture school.
• Proposal of new critical cartographies.
• New maps expressing the potential transformation of the area, including collaborative design for object interventions in the landscape.
• The creation of a virtual platform that enables the visibility of the project.
• Collaborative realization of the objects-intervention in the landscape with new and already existing materials and objects.
// Design Build Projects/ DAAD, Germany, and STO Foundation, Germany
Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Markus Vogl, Univ. Stuttgart, Germany
• “Experimenting, testing the limits, transgressing laws and norms to discover new spheres: that was the prevailing spirit at the Bauhaus.” (Werner David Feist, pupil, 1927)
• The radical pedagogy, in relationship to the Bauhaus way of teaching, there was no defined pedagogy yet so teachers and students had to find their own way of working, this defied them to take control of their learning.
• Thinking & working holistically // Thinking about & allowing for complexity // importance of projecting with a multidisciplinary perspective: humanities, engineering, natural sciences.
» From form-oriented design to design as research in a interdisciplinatry laboratory
» From analysis to synthesis // design turn
» Integrative design process // intrinsic interdisciplinary of design
• He talked about the importance of the real world laboratory: “leaving the university, entering the urban space, testing, risk, and why not fail?”
• What implies the teaching in architecture? What is the social role, position and task of architecture?
• Vogl exposed some of the students works during his work as chair for Urban Planning and Design at the Institute of Urbanism in the University of Stuttgart and as chair of Walter Gropius (DAAD - UBA) in FADU, University of Buenos Aires
» Platform »e1nszue1ns« // adapter // habitable spaces in vacant office buildings
» Taller Uno_a_Uno // biblioteca popular »La Carcova« // San Martin, AMBA
» Polyvalent Everyday Elements // »todo dia« Bienal 2019 // São Paulo, Brasil
» 2015 - 2019 // Future City Lab // Stuttgart and Metropolitan Area
» Studyyear 2019 // Stadtregal // Stuttgart
» Seminar 2022 // »Chozo« Humans and nature in harmony // Cabeza del Buey, Extremadura, Spain
• Coexistence and cohabitation // Projecting thinking in the complexity, the history, the dynamic and stable structures, the landscape, the narratives, the economy, the habitat… experimenting, with a radical pedagogy, commoning, cooperating and making
• At last, architecture is “thinking, designing, investigating, debating, and making in a very complex world”
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Renato d’Alençon, Santiago de Chile Catholic University, Chile
After the Haiti earthquake the city was devastated, much of the infrastructure collapsed and most of the buildings were destroyed or severely damaged.
• Assistance Strategy: The Government of Haiti (GoH) prepared an Action Plan for National Recovery and Development (“Recovery Plan”). There were different aspects to be rebuilt: Territorial Rebuilding, Economic Rebuilding, Institutional Rebuilding and a Social Rebuilding. This last one implicated: housing for the population: temporary and permanent / Creation of high-intensity labour jobs / Social protection/ Education: Returning to school and school construction / Healthcare, food security and nutrition, water and sanitation
• The situation led the locals to build with what they had within their reach, therefore they used debris to build various things, it is interesting how in that moment of need their construction technique adapted to adversity.
• Debris availability in Haiti: is there anything left that is useful? They used debris, and the foundations and walls left to reuse them for the new constructions.
• The project “Bati Kay 2.0 Construction Cooperatives” aimed to improve the quality of life of 30 families in the commune of Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti, affected by the 2010 earthquake, by training and forming a cooperative of construction services, building on the lessons learned from the “Bati Kay: Home and Community” Project, implemented by America Solidaria Foundation between 2005 and 2009.
• The project activities were focused on technical, administrative, legal, and accounting training, based on 100% practical teaching-learning processes. E.g., technical training, which included layout, foundations, and masonry walls, among others, was done by improving the dwellings of participants and community spaces in the area.
• The project sought to be a pilot experience, with a view to transforming the “cooperative model” into a valid alternative for the development of housing projects, encouraging participation, self-management and cooperative values, such as mutual aid, responsibility, equality, equity, and solidarity.
• D’Alençon, his team and several students went to Haiti to help in the reconstruction. They made damage evaluations to know how to proceed in each case and did a cooperative work with the locals to make the housing interventions.
MSc Harald Klein, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
Dr. Caroline Dahl, MA Architecture and MA urban design, Senior Lecturer Landscape Architecture, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
• Presentation of the Think Tank Movium, a research team of the Sweden University of Agricultural Sciences, that aims to contribute to developing and communicating about urban landscapes and generate awareness about sustainable planning, design and management of cities. Movium makes use of research and practice as well, to generate new knowledge.
• Topics this think tank works with: Health-promoting outdoor environments,Transformation of urban landscapes, Urban ecology, Children’s outdoor environments.
• Presentation of Plantarum, a professional search tool developed for those working in the green sector. The database includes over 1200 species of woody plants and 2000 species of herbaceous plants. Each woody and herbaceous specimen is classified according to the following thirteen different characteristics: hardness, size, root-system, growth-form, growth-rate, flowering period, light and soil requirements, special resistance, bud-burst, flower color, leaf color, fall-color and a metric of the the plant’s attractiveness. The woody plants are classified using additional four characteristics.
• Movium group of consultants, that are specialized in diverse fields related to landscape and urbanism, from individual garden design and management, 3d modeling, botany to urban economy, public space and urban design.
• Movium Partnership, a platform of collaboration that associates property owners, consultants, federations and local associations with municipalities, businesses, cemetery administrations and regions. This partnership co-finances collaborative research projects that are relevant to both industries and universities. The foundation makes open calls twice a year and the projects must result in a scientific article, a research application, business or municipal doctoral student or a feasibility study that generates new research ideas.
• The last projects co-funded by Movius involved design through management in urban forest, smart application for need - based tree care, planning for social infrastructure, sustainable perennials for difficult urban conditions, nature-based playscapes for children and young people, living lab campus.
// Urban labs for electric mobility in Montevideo and Quito/ ULLC Urban Living Lab Center Prof. Ing. Juan Carriquiry, UdelaR Montevideo and Research Fellow at the Urban Electric Mobility Initiative gGmbH (UEMI), Germany
• Urban living lab center: Capacity building for the transformation of urban mobility, energy and resource sectors
• Living Lab role:
» Showcase interventions for sustainable and inclusive development, building on the New Urban Agenda and the Paris Agreement.
» Linking key sectors and actors is a vital step towards an integrated approach that helps decarbonizing urban systems and delivers liveable and accessible cities for all.
» Testing innovative solutions in urban living labs can be a key steppingstone, transferring these learnings into scaled-up public or private sector actions is then a vital next step towards transformative change.
• Joint platform for transformative living labs:
» Thematic hubs: Research, elearning, curricula, policy recommendations, business models, co-host PhD candidates // Mobility, energy, governance, resources, water, urban design.
» Coordination group: Facilitation of the partnership and exchange, co-development of curricula, courses and joint programmes // MIT, UNH, WI TUB.
» Regional hubs: Training materials, trainings for local authorities and entrepreneurs, integration in Master`s programmes // Asia, Africa, Europe, Americas.
• Case studies presented:
» SOLUTIONSpluS in Montevideo // Multimodal charging hub in Ciudadela Terminal.
» SOLUTIONSplus in Quito // Historic Center Re-urbanization.
» ACCESS in Buenos Aires, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Medellín, Quito, Ciudad de Mexico, Monterrey, Lima y Callao, Arequipa // Accelerate access to low carbon urban mobility solutions through digitization.
» DTEE: Supporting authorities to move from ambitions to concrete actions to mitigate transport GHGs
// Capacity building for urban development in Germany and Latin America/ ERASMUS
MUNDUS, GIZ, BMBF Germany, Habitat Unit TU Berlin, BORDA
Prof. Dr. Paola Alfaro d’Alençon, Univ of Applied Sciences Frankfurt, Germany
• The Urban Research and Design laboratory, an initiative of the Technical University of Berlin based on models of dialogue that encourages exchanges between research, teaching and practice for interdisciplinary projects and case-study based projects for the education of future city planners. It employs cooperative working formats, involving several stakeholders in a way the students can learn about the complexity of their future field of action.
• In the urban lab there is an important transfer of knowledge between university and other partners, and a collaboration where students are also engaged with complex planning processes located in sensitive areas.
• The idea of the Urban Laboratory Approach, as an interdisciplinary process of research and learning that emphasizes collaborative research and education and brings together the intellectual and disciplinary resources of the academy with the practical spheres of architecture, urban design and planning as well as municipal institutions.
• The Urban Lab+, an international network of urban laboratories with the objectives of strengthening the approaches of ‘Global Learning’ in the building of environmental disciplines, put together research, educational ideas and professional activities on the issues of urban inclusion and exclusion and the production of studies with scientific merit.
• Presentation of the Sustainable Intermediate Cities Program, with the objective of implementing a sustainable urban development in order to improve the living conditions in the cities. It is a multi-actor and multiscalar tool to implement the National Urban Agenda in Ecuador, with a collaboration between Ecuador and Germany. The program has presented several proposals to different international financial institutions, and two mechanisms proposed are already functioning. The stakeholders involved in these programs are the national government, GADs, academia and civil society.
16:00h / Encounter with Dolores Delucchi, International Relations FADU-UBA
• Setting the stage for elaborating university agreements with Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, University of Stuttgart, ULLC and TU Berlin, SLU Malmö, Universidad Catolica Santiago de Chile
ACROSS International Conference 13 April 2023
• Hand-over of Gropius Chair from Prof. Markus Vogl to Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich
• Presentation and panel discussion of international approaches to tackle sustainable urban development for the Pluriverse by crossing hemispheres, disciplines, and the realms of academia and practice
• Launch of the dossier ‘ACROSS’ in ‘scape the international magazine of landscape architecture and urbanism #19/ 2023
Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism FADU, UBA
// Speakers: Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Markus Vogl, Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich, Prof. Dr. Flavio Janches, Dr. Caroline Dahl, Prof. Prof. Dr. Paola Alfaro d'Alençon, Prof. Ing. Juan Carriquiry
10.00-13.00h
Matthias Trager - Head of University and Scientific Affairs, German Embassy of Buenos Aires
Prof. DG. Carlos Venancio - Dean of the FADU-UBA
Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich - Gropius Chair Director
'Architecture
// Prof. Vogl presented the work he had done with Gropius Chair the last years, with a critic of the conventional perspective of the Global North on the Global South. This last concept, often seen as a marginal landscape that needs the help and the teaching of the principal world powers, can be a potential generator of knowledge, with the possibility of changing and challenging preconceived concepts about cities, societies and urban development. The Global South, that often fights and lives with neoliberalist policies, inequality, segregation and negation of natural crisis as climate change, can give new perspectives on co-existence, co- habitation, ecology and urban societies.
In order to this, he brought up the Bauhaus concept of ‘Städtebau’, in its former meaning: a transdiscipline, a method that will be needed to face nowadays globalization challenges. Vogl introduced the idea of Architecture as a Social design, that involves processes of intelligence, human connection and emotions, and showed the project of Biblioteca Popular La Carcova as a result of this kind of architecture. This project is an ongoing process of transformation of a popular neighborhood that involved several actors, such as local organizations, municipalities, universities and students from Argentina and Germany as well.
Vogl emphasized the value that polyvalent urban space, produced by participative, transdisciplinary and collaborative design have in urban development, and brought in the idea of ‘täglich’, as a radical urban building that has this type of synergy for transformation. Finally, he returned to the concept of ‘Städtebau’, and highlighted 3 key components of this transdiscipline that includes engineering, social sciences and natural sciences: practical urbanism (praktischer städtebau), strategic urbanism (strategischer städtebau), structural urbanism (struktureller städtebau).
'Multiversal urban landscapes', Gropius Chair 2023
Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich
Professor of urban landscape SLU, co-editor in chief 'scape, director of the Gropius Chair, FADU-UBA, Argentina
// Diedrich presented her ideas for the future academic years at Gropius Chair, FADU. She introduced 3 concepts that could synthesize what is her vision about urban research, teaching and practice:
‘landscape’, referring to the teaching of urban design and planning, with a holistic approach, where nature and human transformation are part of the same object of study.
‘critique’, as part not only of the research process, but the teaching process as well, with the aim of having a critical point of view about contemporary urban projects.
‘anthropocene’, alluding to a new geological era, defined by the human transformations in the environment that result in climate change, alteration and extinction of species, etc. This new landscape brings up the need of developing a new way of acknowledging it, and living labs can be a useful tool.
Finally, with the presentation of the dossier ‘Across’ of the ‘scape magazine, she looked into the concept ‘across’, as a methodology to use in research, as well in practice. On one hand, referring to the idea of working and collaborating across countries and continents, from the Global North and the Global South, in a reciprocal way. And, on the other hand, referring to the idea of working across disciplines, theory and practice.
11:00 a.m. / ‘Critical Urbanities – urban landscape workshops between Buenos Aires and Malmö’
Prof. Dr. Flavio JanchesProfessor of architecture and urban design, architect, director of the LCJ Chair, FADU-UBA, Argentina
//Janches started explaining what Linnaeus-Palme Partnership exchange program between SLU Sweden and FADU Argentina is and how it works and their focus on critical waterscapes, seeking for urban and landscape design for a sustainable development. A collaborative, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and multidirectional work is the method used as a way of redefining the questions. Collaborations and cooperation are carried out to resignify, in the co-transfer of knowledge, the best practices in contexts with different territorial dynamics.
“Thinking about how we think allows us to define a viable urban transformation model around relationships between things previously perceived as unrelated. It allows us to create new values that, ‘acting unacceptably’, design questions, reformulate problems and build alternative thoughts to ‘solve what is wrong.’ Promoting ways of thinking, framing problems, detecting values, communicating results”
Re-evaluations have an important role in this type of exchange, in a continuous process of reading, design and evaluation of trans-disciplinary dialogues and knowledge transfers. The re-evaluation of the methods and proposals presented will allow to re-determine, in new collaborations and conversations, the evolution of the framework and the possible results. The exchange gives place to creative dialogues between different ways of thinking, the global south and global north co-transfer knowledge in this process. Janches also showed various works of students that showcased this co-creation of knowledge between Sweeden and Argentina.
11:15 a.m. / ‘KOPRO: a research of co - produced urban projects developed in Santiago and Berlín’
Prof. Dr. Paola Alfaro d'Alençon Architect and urban planner, professor of Frankfurt University and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, research fellow DFG-KOPRO, TU Berlin
// Alfaro d’Alençon introduced the concept of co-production, as a process that disrupts the conventional way of transforming urban landscapes. In her conference, she presented a “conceptual body” with ideas that explained why these projects appeared: in response to a private - led urban development and the emergence of new kinds of alliances, between private actors, civil society and state. Co-production brings up new forms of generating knowledge, challenges conventional urban development models and proposes new ways of policy making and governance.
Alfaro d’Alençon presented literature as well as case studies to define what are these coproduced projects and how they can be generated. Finally she introduced a step by step methodology in order to study these types of projects. The first step would be finding the different research dimensions: the socio-spatial development, the knowledge generated as by products of these projects, and urban governance. Then, getting in touch with the civil society, and the different communities coliving inside. The following three steps would be mapping, transformation of site and scaling up the interventions.
She concluded that co-produced projects are usually found in low income communities, and are results of constellations of actors. These types of associations are also a new form of producing knowledge, and at the same time express urban processes of a bigger scale.
MA Architecture and MA urban design, Senior Lecturer Landscape Architecture, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden
// Plan redux invites for a rethinking on how cities are built. The scope of their collaboration is to re-thinking place and process in city transformation, the rethinking is called for due to several reasons and by different actors both in practice and academia. For some years an increasing critique towards conventional master planning has surfaced calling for more flexible protocols responding to changing socio/economic/political or natural conditions, less generic planning in favor of a higher sensibility for site specific qualities and conditions but also better use of existing resources including civil societies engagement.”
The conclusions that came up from plan Redux were that the process needs to parent the plan, that specificities of a place encompass the cultural heritage,and that urban planning proceeds through management and derives from variation in time rather than form. Furthermore, for Dahl, flexibility is an essential tool in urban planning processes, stabilizing elements can be utilized to anker incremental development, and processes are tailored for knowledge development and feedback.
Plan Redux encouraged understanding time and temporalities differently than conventional master planning and navigating temporalities. At the same time, it put project development versus design processes, in favor of the last one and promoted the navigation through fixity and flexibility, in order to merge design actions that are apprehended as contradictory. Finally, it proposed to speculate about what can be done with what they had while still enriching the ideas to include both practices and material effects, creating new urban imaginaries and expanding aesthetics.
‘The ULLC Urban Living Lab Center – urban mobility, energy and natural resources’
Prof.
Ing.Juan Carriquiry
Professor of UdelaR Montevideo and Research Fellow at the Urban Electric Mobility Initiative gGmbH (UEMI), Germany
// Carriquiry presented to the audience what Urban Living Labs are, and what is the rol of them. “In a Living Lab, the link between key actors and sectors is a vital step towards an integrated approach that helps decarbonise urban systems and tends towards livable and accessible cities. The testing of innovative solutions in living urban laboratories can be a key step, transferring learning to scaling actions, both public and private.” he said.
He also talked about regional hubs, how they have: face-to-face and blended learning activities adapted to the students, training centers for academic and professional programs and support for local start-ups.
He presented three projects related to sustainable mobility: the SOLUTIONSplus to improve the center of Quito with a focus on electric vehicles, which also takes place in Uruguay and contemplates the transformation of the Terminal Ciudadela of Montevideo in a multimodal charging hub, the ACCESS project to improve mobility in several Latin American countries through digitization, and DTEE that seeks measures to mitigate emissions in transport.
‘To transform and to be transformed’
// Panel discussion with Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich, Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Markus Vogl, Prof. Dr. Flavio Janches, Prof. Dr. Paola Alfaro d’Alençon, Dr. Caroline Dahl and Prof. Ing. Juan Carriquiry
// with the grantees of the Linnaeus Palme Partnership between FADU-UBA and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Malmö 2014-2023: Prof. Adj. María Jesús Huarte, Prof. Adj. Andres Ferrari, Adj. Andrea Winter, Adj. Pedro Sardin, Adj. Erika Laufgang, Adj. Luciana Breide, all FADU-UBA
//directed by Prof. Adj. Max Rohm, LCJ FADU-UBA
Closing
Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich, Gropius Chair Director
ACROSS the urban worlds – learning and acting together
Selected presentations of the ACROSS Symposium have been published in the dossier ‚Across – urban futures across the hemispheres’ in ‚scape the international magazine of landscape architecture and urbanism #19/2023. These texts document the symposium topics and complement them by others adopting similar lenses on urban space, from architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture. This publication offers material for study beyond the event.
The editors of the dossier, Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich and Prof. Max Rohm, suggest that the process of urbanisation and its impacts on ecosystems and living conditions is the aspect of the environmental crisis in which the design professions can become protagonists and of true help. Climate change and globalising economies are global challenges that have an impact on the spatial organisation of cities and urban sites on the local level. Urban living conditions are crucial in times of planetary urbanisation, both in the Global North and South. As urbanisation processes influence each other around the globe the question is: how to learn shaping them together? In this quest, the ‘scape dossier publishes methods of co-creation and co-transfer of urban transformation knowledge, methods, and education, developed by actors from both hemispheres.
In the opening article of the dossier, political scientist and urban ecologist Prof. Dr. Oliver Lah presents the newly created Urban Living Lab Center ULLC which he is directing, a joint venture of Technical University Berlin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wuppertal Institute, which is affiliated with UN Habitat as a ‘collaborating centre’. Its mission is to translate transformative science into real world projects, inter alia in the field of urban planning, relevant to the actors of the ACROSS Symposium, and presented by ULLC member and urban mobility expert Prof. Juan Carriquiry of the Udelar University in Montevideo.
Leaving behind conventional science for the sake of real-world experiments was exactly what sustainable development scholar Prof. Dr. Jonathan Barton, interviewed in the ‘scape dossier, intended when he started Laboratorios Urbanos, a special unit of the Chilean research institute CEDEUS, promoting urban labs as a new form of research. The interview sheds light on the difficulties and achievement this research format has yielded over ten years.
To raise new governance methods in urban planning, urbanism scholars Prof. Dr. Paola Alfaro d’Alençon, Federico Gulielmo Castracane and Nikolaus Podlaha write about their study which compares urban transformation and co-production processes in neighbourhoods of Santiago de Chile and Berlin, and which involve the ‘majority world’ of those who conventionally have no say in urban planning. This project was presented by Paola Alfaro d’Alençon of Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences at the ACROSS Symposium in voce viva.
Prof. Markus Vogl, architect, urban designer, and outgoing director of the Gropius Chair at the University of Buenos Aires, explains in his article how teaching students across cultures and geographies is more necessary than ever in a polarising and digitising world, while presenting design-build from the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, which he elaborated with students and local stakeholders, many of whom are organised in cooperatives.
Scholars of architecture and pedagogy respectively, Prof. Dr. Henrietta Palmer and Prof. Dr. Ian Loew report on their decade-long research on critical urban situations in Göteborg, Sweden, Cape Town, South Africa, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Delhi, India which allowed them to identify new ways of working with communities to foster urban change. This, as they claim,
comes with a new ‘language’, one that accepts that cities are always in the ‘becoming’, never finished. Their research has given raise to a comprehensive book entitled ‘The Language of the Becoming City’.
Urban design, planning and landscape scholars and practitioners Prof. Dr. Flavio Janches, Prof. Dr. Diego Sepulveda and Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich in their article formulate lessons learnt from student and teacher exchange between Buenos Aires, Argentina, Malmö, Sweden, and Delft, The Netherlands, which generated a conversation that turned into a research project about ways of shaping formal and informal districts in urban water landscapes ‘beyond best practice’. Flavio Janches shed light on this research at the ACROSS Symposium.
Prof. Dr. Kathrin Wieck, Dr. Natacha Quintero González, Dr. Juliana Canedo, Dr. Fernanda Petrus, and Toni Karge are landscape architecture and urban design researchers situated in Berlin and Rio de Janeiro respectively. They write about their work with communities in Rio to carve out a method called ‘dual design’, which means designing while building, and which allows to shape common ground among citizens, designers and researchers, both local and foreign.
Landscape architect and scholar Prof. Dr. Undine Giseke explains in her article how reshaping the ‘socio-natural linkages’ of people, agricultural produce, water, waste and energy in a neighbourhood of Kigali, Ruanda, has inspired a regional development project in Rhinluch in the German region of Brandenburg.
Urban designers and researchers Yosra Malek and Prof. Dr. Cornelia Redeker show in their article how the study of agricultural production landscapes in dry and hot Cairo, Egypt, helped gain insight into landscape architectural ‘healing and adapting’ for cold and wet Umeå in Arctic Sweden.
To complement the project-centred main body of the ‘scape dossier, two essays shed light on the role of collective work for transformative action, and on the power of visualising cross-cutting impressions. In their collective writing, the grantees of a Swedish-Argentinian student and teacher exchange programme in urban design and landscape architecture state that what was meant to enlighten them about the transformation of cities and urban landscapes through design ended up with transforming themselves and their postures towards local and global cultures. The architect and photographer Pablo Gerson selected images from his work on remote productive landscapes in the Argentine Pampas and the US Midwest to articulate new perceptions and relationships between distant yet astonishingly similar territories, which are out of sight to most urbanites.
Incoming Gropius Chair director Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich, one of the editors of the ‘scape dossier, concluded at the ACROSS Symposium that it is the real-world experiment – today often performed in so-called Urban Labs, Living Labs, or Real World Labs – that prompts the emergence of a new kind of ‘working knowledge’. It is geared towards a more sustainable way of urban living, it is engaging communities, saving resources, and adapting to uncertain futures. In an academic framework, this illustrates the concept of transformative science, complementary to conventional ideas of science. The conditio sine qua non: to co-create such working knowledge on-site, and to co-transfer lessons learnt with actors from both ends of the transfer operation, always ensuring to go ‘across’ to inform projects as processes of change towards more promising urban futures.
This is what the researchers who gathered at the ACROSS Symposium will now continue to work on, with the aim to remain connected in a network devices collaborative teaching, research and capacity building.
The participants of the ‘ACROSS’ symposium agree that educating designers and locals in the field of architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture across the hemispheres means to address both the global dimension of designing cities and metropolitan areas, and their local differences. This is why they want to elaborate university collaboration for transdisciplinary and design-based teaching, research and capacity building. Relying on the instruments of transformative science, they aim to develop urban living labs, including local stakeholders, professionals and researchers in topical urban development projects spanning selected regions of the globe, so far Germany and Sweden in Europe, and Argentina, Chile, Uruguay in Latin America.
The overarching aim of the academic network emerging from the ‘ACROSS’ symposium is to contribute to the advancement of critical knowledge, or working knowledge, for fragile urban landscapes, and to help find methods for improving socio-spatially fragmented urban areas characterised by changing landscape conditions. The network strives to allow students, researchers, professionals and stakeholders to learn from each other across the hemispheres, across practice and academia, and across the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and to develop the agency to tackle global challenges in transdisciplinary, transareal and transscalar ways for local situations. They also commit to enable students, researchers, professionals and stakeholders to study analytically and synthetically the interrelatedness of natural processes and human practices in cities and metropolitan areas, and to develop urban sustainability projects for a globalising world.
This resonates with the aims formulated by the United Nations Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals, as also expressed in UN Habitat’s New Urban Agenda. For the participants of the ‘ACROSS’ symposium, internationally relevant research, teaching and capacity building relies on strong partners at the cooperating universities and their links to broader networks inside and outside their respective institutions. The idea is to develop common teaching and research based on critical thinking about global processes and their local implications, especially with regards to urban development practice and theory in European and Latin American contexts.
Current members
ACROSS Symposium participants representing
• the Universidad Buenos Aires (Argentina),
• the Universidad Catolica de Santiago de Chile (Chile),
• the Universidad de la Republica (Montevideo),
• the Technical University of Berlin (Germany)
• the University of Stuttgart (Germany),
• the University of Applied Sciences of Frankfurt (Germany),
• the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences at Alnarp (Sweden).
The intent is to integrate the remaining authors of the ‘scape dossier ACROSS, and their respective academic and/or professional institutions, and to scout out other relevant actors across practice and academia.
Overarching topics
Pluriversal Design – Urban Landscapes – Co-produced Neighbourhoods
• Public space design: the role of co-design, evolutive design, temporary interventions
• Public urban space: designing for/with new urban mobilities
• New forms of co-producing urban neighbourhoods: design for/with cooperatives, design for/with local developers
• Transforming informal and formal urban districts: designing for/with fragmented societies and spaces
• Shaping postindustrial landscapes: design-based urban planning
• Transforming urban water and wood landscapes: designing for climate change adaptation and mitigation
Methods/ Theories
Transdisciplinary – Transscalar – Transareal
• Citizen science, in particular Real world labs, Living labs, Urban labs, Field stations
• Action research and ethnographic methods, incl. Design-build and Prototyping
• Futures studies, incl. Delphi, Critical design, Speculative Design
• Design research (research on, for, through design)
• Comparative case studies, incl. critical discourse analysis, material flows analysis
• Design-oriented (remote) site studies and (immersive) fieldwork, incl. Travelling Transects
• Artistic research, incl. multimedia forms of expression and communication
Sites/ Empirical sources
Argentina – Chile – Uruguay – Germany – Sweden
• Cities and metropolitan landscapes Latin America
• Cities and metropolitan landscapes in Europe
Potential Funders
International – National
• Institutional/European: Erasmus+, Horizon Europe, ERC programmes
• Institutional/national: German BMBF, BMZ, DFG, BBSR, GIZ, DAAD, Swedish Formas, VR, Vinnova, SIDA
• Institutional/universities: SLU-Movium Partnerskap, UBA-PDE, UBA-CyT
• Foundations/national: Dutch Playspace, German STO, German Wüstenrot
Goals
Joint applications for research, teaching, capacity building
• Develop research network ACROSS
• Arrange working group with regular virtual meetings
• Arrange occasional on-site meeting at conferences and other academic events
• Develop research themes and ways to support them through practice and teaching
• Identify research funders and programs
• Join existing research consortia in the field of sustainable urban development and urban living labs
• Set up own research consortia based on identified research interests and funding opportunities
Activities
Calendar 2023
• May-Sept: Identification of research programs and application possibilities
• June: Invitation to Symposium participants to join working group ACROSS
• June- : regular ACROSS working group meetings to build consortia and applications
• June-July: Visits and content development with network partners in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Berlin, Braunschweig
• 22-24 August: Consortium building and content development workshop ULLC in Potsdam
• 4-5 Sept: Follow-up symposium ACROSS with some more ‘scape dossier authors in Malmö
