CULTURA

CULTURA

CULTURA

CULTURA

CULTURA

Placemaking and community engagement are ongoing concerns for the development of healthier and more inclusive cities. People move to cities looking for financial, social and political stability and by the year 2050, it is expected that two-thirds of the human population will be living in a city, spaces which represent beyond their physical infrastructures a multilayered complexity of human relations and interactions. This work aims to test the disruption possibilities of design, written language, and storytelling as tools to make evident the active role of individuals in the construction and development of their physical space. The objective of this project is to test design as a medium of positive activism to spark community creation. Through different experiments, I connect design thinking methods with the fields of storytelling and activism, in order to develop community-making processes. The concept of -The City- is approached from a scale perspective, from house, to neighbour, to district, to city, and points out the lack of interaction and communication among neighbours as one of the elements responsible of the insular lifestyle mode of today’s western societies. An issue which is playing a harmful effect in human health and politics. For the practical phase of the research, I chose a student accommodation building in the district of Deutz in the city of Cologne. A building initially characterized by the lack of care among its inhabitants but at the same time with the potential to become a hub for multicultural exchange. Concepts from psychology, architecture, storytelling, and language are intertwined through the research with the aim of making unknown individuals feel part of a group and envision a physical environment together. The same way as a narration the work is divided into three main phases: Reading cities, Writing cities and Re-reading cities. Through them, concepts of belonging and co-creation, are linked with the possibilities of design as a way of activism to become a tool to gradually change the perceptions of physical space and to build upon the idea of what is needed to design and who designs.

The auto-construction of dwellings in pirate urbanisations produces about 70% of low-income housing in Bogota. People with scarce resources, usually migrants from the countryside, opt to purchase an individual lot from a clandestine urbaniser that extra-legally subdivides terrains near the city boundaries. Ideally, in about 15 years span, self-builders progressively manage to construct a Casalote: a 3 to 4 storeys edifice, which provides them not only urban dwelling but also a considerable source of income. Casalotes progressively grow next to each other and eventually amalgamate into large, functional and vibrant urban pieces more or less integrated to the city's fabric. This work tries to trace the links between the emergence of informal urbanisations and the structure of the architectural-units generated along the process. It seeks to answer the question whether one can speak of architectural principles, actually determining the shape of "informal" buildings and urbanisations. It focuses on Bogota, a city that has incubated a systematic mode of land subdivision and edification outside the hegemonic planning system: Pirate urbanisation, or the process of emergence of informal urbanisations, and autoconstruction, or the edificatory product-means delivering actual housing solutions upon those urbanisations. The analysis comprehends three sections: (a) a discussion on the dipole "formal-informal". (b) A critical reading, at three different scales ("world", "cities", "Bogota"), of the legal, social, political, tectonic, and economic dimensions of the process. (c) A detailed description of a single Casalote and its neighbourhood in Bogota, observed between 2006 and 2012. This last section reconstructs the building as recounted by its inhabitants, in order to deconstruct it into its architectural components and, eventually, re-compose it in the form architectural principles.

Abstract: Emotional Nature is a hands-on learning experience and toolkit that connects different tangible and intangible tools for educators to visualise, grasp and engage in a dialogue with emotions in relation to materials. The Emotional Nature toolkit is also a temporary safe space for educators and children to motivate their understanding of emotions, as well as meaningful connections with nature. The learning is enhanced through a creative and fun process combining tools like value cards, storytelling, meditation, natural inks, and mainly wood-based biomaterials. Having regular contact and meaningful connections with nature have several benefits for humans from playful learning to wellbeing, from bonding relations with other beings to inner self. This research is focused on the specific relationships between emotions and materials, and it is supported by a bigger academic context - The CHEMARTS strategy. The research process is designed in response to the main findings from the initial exploratory phase of Emotional Nature. First, biomaterials as a key tool to feel nature, as well as express and materialise emotions; second, the difficulties in dealing with emotions in the classroom; and third, the reduced availability of safe and comfortable spaces to share and transform emotions in Finnish educational context. This study is an explorative approach based on self-experimentation and participatory design research practices done mainly with teachers and field experts. The research design seeks to inspire educators to explore and grasp relationships between emotions and nature through the experimentation with biomaterials and diverse tools in Finnish School Context. The main audience for Emotional Nature Learning Experience are educators of children between 10 and 13 years old. However, based on the co-creation sessions with different populations, such as parents and postgraduate students, the hands-on learning experience also proved to beeffective for other age groups and settings.

Agriculture was the engine of growth for a more established communities, a symbol of progress that became an important step forward to a civilization. However, the growth of cities has been weakened the reciprocal relationships that existed between human settlements and farming. In Beijing’s green belt for instance, the urbanization phenomena colonized productive landscapes where farmland and nature areas have been replaced by dense cityscapes. Caochangdi village in northeast Beijing, illustrates a condition of a place which needs physical and social integration with the green belt where it is located. In this sense, this thesis describes a proposal that take advantage of Urban farming, bringing community together around food production, ecological practices and the capacity of environment transformation through the strategy based on The Continuous productive urban landscapes (CPULs). From this perspective, farming practice wherein an urban fringe context, pretends improve environmental and living conditions of their residents by recovering and adapting existing open areas that will work as a productive public spaces for them and also for people from metropolitan area, finding an alternative space to interact with agriculture but at the same time with people’s neighborhood. CPULs implementation will have the potential to be replicated along the green belt area through an agricultural infrastructure highly adaptive formed by scaffolding, integrating other settlements and recovering its former function towards a sustainable area. This will be part of dynamic of daily resident’s life, with the aim of building community identity and raising social cohesion among them and metropolitan people that visit and use the new area improved by urban farming. La agricultura fue el motor de crecimiento para comunidades más consolidadas, un símbolo de progreso que se convirtió en un gran paso hacia la civilización. Sin embargo, el crecimiento de las ciudades ha debilitado la relación reciproca que existía entre los asentamientos humanos y la agricultura. En el cinturón verde de Beijing por ejemplo, el fenómeno de la urbanización colonizó paisajes productivos donde áreas naturales y de cultivo han sido reemplazados por paisajes densos de ciudad. Villa Caochangdi al noreste de Beijing, ilustra la condición de un lugar que necesita una integración física y social al cinturón verde donde se encuentra ubicada. En este sentido, la esta tesis describe una propuesta que se aprovecha de la agricultura urbana, reuniendo a la comunidad alrededor de la producción de alimento, prácticas ecológicas y la capacidad de transformación del medio ambiente a través de la estrategia basada en Paisajes productivos continuos urbanos (CPULs). Desde está perspectiva, la practica de la agricultura en los limites urbanos, pretende mejorar las condiciones ambientales y de vida de sus residentes, recuperando y adaptando espacios abiertos existentes que servirían como espacios públicos productivos para ellos y para las personas del área metropolitana que visitarían y usarían las nuevas zonas mejoradas por la agricultura urbana.

Abstract: The marketplaces of Bogotá are facing a decrease in frequency and a stiff competition against supermarket chains. In addition, the problems are related to various historical events, conceptions, and social and cultural changes that the city and its inhabitants have had since it’s beginning. The extinction of these spaces would endanger the disappearance of a part of the cultural identity of Colombians. In addition, it’s a space in the city where there is an interaction of all social classes, it is also the bearer of the country's local food and therefore carries part of the gastronomical heritage, which depends of the basic family basket of the country. This directly affects the rural economy, especially farmers and low-income people. Seeing this problem, my intention is to reach a solution through an architectural proposal that aims to recover the intangible cultural heritage of the marketplaces. With an urban-architectural design of a new market conception located in the neighborhood of Usaquén at the north of Bogotá, the objective is to create an urban detonator that transforms the dynamics of this sector by changing the mentality of its citizens about the conception they usually have about the markets; generate social sustainability in terms of the fight against social segregation; generate economic sustainability by competing directly with supermarket chains, directly supporting the rural economy; and finally creating a sustainable design of the building with an emphasis on the collection of rainwater and the use of solar panels.