dpusummerLab was born out of the MSc Building & Urban Design in Development (BUDD) course in 2009 and expanded in 2010 to a wider Bartlett Development Planning Unit initiative. Drawing on the progressive action-research and practice-based ethos of the DPU in collaboration with local partners in various host cities, the workshop series aims to leverage the reality of the city as a laboratory for developing socially responsive design measures. It is intended to provoke, stimulate, and reconsider the role of designers in promoting spatial justice.

Focusing on the changing landscapes, contested processes and interdependencies within cities, the dpusummerLab series asserts that to appropriately engage in this arena, a critical recalibration is required concerning a new paradigmatic shift in the cultures and disciplines of design and urban practice.

dpusummerLab seeks to establish a unique rotating platform for in situ immersion and experimentation where the boundaries of spatial agency and design processes are actively pushed, hinging upon critical analysis and spatial knowledge development. The workshops which are geared toward students and emerging professionals with backgrounds and/or keen interest in the urban environment offer a vital testing ground for the proposing of contextual, hybridized spatial interventions embedded with socio-political agendas. 

Medellin | Everyday Infrastructures

in collaboration with Master in Urban and Regional Studies (MEUR) at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellin Campus

25-30 August 2014

SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE - SEE BELOW

Medellin has been defined the “rising star” of the Latin American urbanism and received global attention for its social urbanism program; innovative urban projects aiming to re-integrate the city, enabling marginalised communities to be empowered and reconnected to the magical urban core.

Metrocable car systems and the provision of large cultural infrastructure projects, library parks and public space interventions have changed the face of the city and more specifically that of the impoverished slope communities. However, we question why Medellin remains the most inequitable city in Latin America despite huge public investments and high quality architecture in informal settlements.

This year’s summerLab will - through a deconstruction of the notion of social urbanism’s discursive practices and an understanding of the aesthetics regimes of both government and grassroots - look into the every day realities of a specific Communa on the slopes of Medellin. It aims to understand the small grassroots interventions in Communa 8’s territory and to see how spaces are created and constructed as alternative and counter-hegemonic urban planning in contrast to the grand beautification gestures of the city. Thus, the summerLab will focus on the intersections of livelihoods and domestic space as an avoided substance in the social urbanism core tenets.  

The convergence of a strategic location, recent public investment in community facilities, and a strong community organization makes Communa 8 a unique city sector to engage in a deep transformation. Despite the urban-armed conflict, or because of it, a new political interest in Comuna 8 emerged in the last years focusing on mobility infrastructure. Nowadays, it is the epicentre of the implementation of the metropolitan green belt and a new extension phase of the metropolitan integrated transit system to connect the sector with downtown area.

Accessibility and connectivity are relevant issues in this hilly area mostly urbanized through informal processes. However, both projects have been contested and sparkled discontent among inhabitants for ignoring pressing issues and community priorities. Nonetheless, a strong community organization has promoted social mobilization to contend those projects and implement their own Local Development Plan. Therefore, the site becomes a fertile scenario for unveiling the clashes and potentials between bottom up and top down planning initiatives at work.

The closing date for applications is Monday 14 July 2014.

Dublin | Urban Crisis

in collaboration with Michael Byrne (National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, NUI Maynooth), Patrick Bresnihan (Provisional University) and with the facilitation of Andrea Rigon.

1-6 September 2014

Between 1997 and 2007 Dublin underwent an extraordinary property bubble that saw prices increase dramatically in commercial and residential real estate and significant levels of new development. This process drove Irish economic growth and was underpinned by the generation of vast quantities of debt. The exposure of the banking sector to debt and the reliance of the economy on real estate were revealed following the credit crunch. In the subsequent major economic crisis, the government nationalized virtually the entire banking sector and strongly intervened in the financial-real estate markets via the creation of the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA), a ‘bad bank’ or Asset Management Company.

The Dublin Docklands area was at the centre of real estate development in Dublin. The docks had gone through a period of decline from the 1970s due deindustrialisation and the introduction of containerization. During the 1990s and 2000s this historic working class area was then targeted with a host of tax relief schemes for development. It became a Financial Services Centre (essentially a tax haven) with office spaces and ‘yuppie’ apartments. Following the crisis, much of the undeveloped land and many assets are now held by NAMA. In the post-crisis context, with credit unavailable in Ireland and most property developers bankrupt, the attention has turned to international real estate players: hedge funds, private equity firms, ‘vulture funds’ and Real Estate Investment Trusts.

The resistance to financialisation and its impact on urban development has largely been led by local working class communities. However, there has also been a large growth in ‘DIY urbanism’: small, everyday projects that are about opening up access to urban space and participation in ‘city-making’. These include social centres, art spaces, community gardens, ‘pop-ups’ and squats. While these spaces don’t have an explicitly political focus, they offer a different view of how urban space can be created, accessed and managed.

This summerLab will analyse how political economic dynamics such as the crisis and the process of financialisation have transformed urban space and the nature of the city and how citizens have contested this process. The Docklands area provides a case study for the dynamics of the financialisation of urban development, which have mutated in the post-crisis context and have wide relevance in European peripheries, as well as in the Global South ones.

The closing date for applications is Monday 14 July 2014.

Beirut | Patchwork City

in collaboration with Public Interest Design Levant and the Design Department, Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts / University of Balamand

8-13 September 2014

The Civil War that lasted a good 15 years up until the early 90s has contributed greatly to the ever-changing dynamics of the urban fabric in Beirut. Neighbourhoods that had previously been entwined were suddenly broken across political and sectarian trajectories. The recovery process following the war was centred on the built environment, managing to create only a patchwork of different fabrics, both social and physical, but communities were still dissected.

The recovery of Beirut’s physical condition was, in itself, a dividend, selective of the neighbourhoods to intervene in where some areas were neglected while others were developed extensively.

The Beirut summerLab intervenes in an area that has suffered tremendously from the war, and has since been neglected. Situated by the port and where the train station once existed, it has seen industrialization slowly take over, radically changing its perceived image and shadowing its residential parts. The neighbourhood itself has been sliced along sectarian and political boundaries during the war, and was distanced from Beirut along a highway during the 50s.

Through interactions with the residents and local stakeholders, design research, tactical interventions, and systems mapping, the workshop will expose the participants to the complexity of the different community narratives, determining their socio-spatial parameters and measuring their presence, interactivity, interdependence and independence within the spatial contours of the neighbourhood. The activity will provide an understanding of the dynamics, foundations, values and systems that these communities are built around. The participants will then collaborate with the purpose to create new links of cohesion, acceptance and openness between the communities, and provide an outlook to social, cultural, environmental and economic development.

The closing date for applications is Monday 14 July 2014.

Thanks to the support of our local partners the first 20 participants of thedpusummerLab in Beirut will receive free student accommodation for the duration of the workshop.

London | Localising Legacies

in collaboration with Alberto Duman (Artist, School of Art and Design, Middlesex University, London)

15-20 September 2014

As speculation still fumes on the future impact of the 2012 Olympic Games on East London development, various pockets of this fluctuating area are already at work to reclaim their place and identity in the midst of capital-driven schemes. The Olympic Village and its satellite developments – in the immediate surroundings and further away, following the ‘arc of opportunity’ from Stratford to the Royal Docks – are only one side of the so-called ‘London Legacy’. On the other one, we see areas containing informal living, buildings that have been squatted, demographic data that remain mostly unknown.

In parallel, the UK’s Localism Act of 2011 has been charged with regulating regeneration across the country: whether or not this policy will yield appropriate action, its existence raises many questions for the multiple opportunities in which East London and its many realities can move forward. If not a policy such as this one, what other measures can be devised locally to counter grand plans and market tendencies? Could we perceive a global city branding strategy to serve as a model for local associations, perhaps one adopted on a more qualitative and grassroots basis?

Trying to answer these questions, we seek to expose emergent urbanisms that are now facing the re-development of East London in the shade of the mega-event impact. Participants will be immersed into the realities of various communities in East London, through visits to new landmarks, neighbourhood journeys, citizens’ and communities’ inputs. The workshop will experiment and play with considerations of localised ‘branding’ and crowdsourcing, and understand possibilities for critical social interventions and design strategies at various scales and output types.

The closing date for applications is Monday 14 July 2014. 

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