Shrinking Cities – Reinventing Urbanism Competition 2004 (detailed pdf)
Shrinking cities are a cultural challenge to us. In the Shrinking Cities project, architects, academics and artists investigate recent developments in Detroit, Ivanovo, Manchester / Liverpool and Halle / Leipzig – and make suggestions.
What constitutes a city, if it can no longer be experienced as a built and used continuum? How do we treat fragments of urban space? How do we deal with what changes in technology and civilisation have rendered obsolete? How do people live without a means of earning their daily bread? Can social capital substitute for insufficient investment? What cultural practices develop in daily life? Are unplanned things potential sources of new, positive, identity? Even of a utopia? …
Projects can respond to questions concerning spatial, structural, cultural, medial, communicative, social or economic questions of urban transformation … Possible directions of inquiry: de-densification, amplification, adaptation, crossing, abuse, and changing the rules … Projects should be conceived as interventions into the physical or media spaces of the city.
Competition deadline Apr 2004
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