We address topics, by working on different scales, concerning local structures up to the over-all city level, we think about local potentials and aggregated strategies, address local actors and therefore want to develop new space as well as potential for the urban society in Buenos Aires. We adduce PiedrabuenArte, a former shed and deposit of the world-famous Teatro Colón, as an Urban Lab, cooperate with local artists of the huge housing complex Piedrabuena and aim to transform it to an innovative and structure shaping cultural centre.Inputs lectures, site visits from guests will be given and teams of students from various interdisciplinary and cultural backgrounds will work together.
Buenos Aires metropolitan region with more than 13 million inhabitants performs as the economic and cultural centre of Argentina. The city is marked by a long and turbulent continental as well as European-driven history of immigration that led to a huge and diverse urban everyday culture. In the upcoming summer term 2018, students from both University of Buenos Aires as well as the Technical University of Vienna will participate in a joint workshop in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires that aims to challenge the social ecological and spatial conditions along the Reconquista river, one of the most polluted river basins of the South American continent. The shantytowns, neighbourhoods and districts in the north western part of the metropolitan area will disclose the other side of the medal from the home city of Tango with extensively production, storage and industrial facilities, with autistic social housing developments, prestigious developments of gated communities and neglected residential neighbourhoods. We will dive into the quest for local dynamics and the local, spatial potentials of fragmented and marginalized areas in Buenos Aires metropolitan area. We will research by designing the specific qualities of spaces and places and develop new spaces and places for opportunities, the most significant and innovative issues and topics in the field of a continuously revolving, globalized world: The urban commons, a social economy, of social housing, of new ways of working, employment and services in the city.
Informal settlements, prevalent in all Latin America’s metropolitan areas, bear disproportionate risks from dysfunctional water infrastructure, polluted by agricultural and industrial waste, and subject to the effects of climate-change induced extreme precipitation patterns and the resulting floods. We can read these areas as urban water landscapes, as man made land that resulted from the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors and therefore create complex cultural interrelationships that can be apprehended in a research by design approach that combines quantitative and qualitative methods, that aims for new, more agile, locally attuned and integrative planning tools and techniques.
The joint workshop as integral part of an international, interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research project (PDE Desarrollo Urbano Integral UBA FADU Buenos Aires) proposes to develop such tools and techniques for the Reconquista River Basin Area with agricultural expanses upstream, an accumulation of industry, waste dumps and service facilities midstream, gated communities downstream, and ever growing informal settlements along the flood-prone areas mid- and downstream.
