From The ' Right to the City' to the ' Right to the Countryside': Designing Installations as an Urban Renovation Strategy

Cristina Murphy (XCOOP/MSU)
Carla Brisotto (University of Florida, School of Architecture)

We are used to seeing bottom-up initiatives happening in every US post-industrial city. Common people create and support community gardens, parklets, and food trucks festivals demonstrating an interest in urban public space. According to Lefebvre, “urbanization” equally involves the city and the countryside since both are colonized by humans. Yet, Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’ has been used by designers solely to supports Sustainable Design for cities, de facto leaving countrysides, behind. Considering that the majority of the United States of America is rural, architects should no longer ignore the design of civic, public-spirited, and inclusive spaces in rural areas.

How do we design for the countryside in ways that instigate Resiliency in the processes? Designers should take the lead in demonstrating that civil, public-spirited, and inclusive spaces can also be generated in rural areas, achieving a “Right to the Countryside.” Design installations can become an active part of participatory methodologies in defining the relationships and interactions between rural inhabitants and their surroundings. In doing so, installations become filter between users and designers helping the achievement of the “Right to the Countryside.”

This workshop aims (1) to introduce the audience to the use of design installations as a tool of investigation to understand how to transmute people uses of space into more inclusive and participatory designed public space, (2) to review city installations, observing how acupuncture interventions are successful in upgrading marginalized areas of the inner city and hypothesize how similar interventions can mitigate the current phenomenon of isolation and public space disappearance in the countryside, and (3) toengage the audience an interactive session in which the audience will actively participate in the comparison of urban and rural installations.

The audience will be divided into two groups. Both will be in charge of analyzing a rural and an urban installation, respectively that the presenters of the workshops will provide. Analysis of these precedents will be conducted under a social and spatial lens hence for both we are interested in understanding how the pop-up structure works in space and how people react to it.

Are the main spatial and social results created by the sudden introduction of a foreign installation triggering the same degree of interaction? The same visceral and immediate reaction in space and among the people experiencing the happening? Is it possible to imagine urban and rural spaces where small-scale interventions engage individual citizens with issues of our times and addressed at an accessible scale? Through installations, can we attempt to find the cure necessary to reconnect cities to their countryside and vice versa? Finally, can installations help architects to sharpen our critical understanding of the variety of (built and unbuilt) environments and their inhabitants?

After projects are been evaluated the participants will all come back together to discuss findings.