SoHoLab, a JPI Urban Europe funded project within the ERA-NET Cofund Smart Urban Futures, is in its final stage and will be hosting three webinars this fall, 13, 20, 27 October 2020, to highlight progresses and results.
Third episode: In the period before and after World War 2, large-scale housing developments with towers and slabs in a green environment were an important spatial paradigm in social housing construction. This came to an abrupt end after the crisis in the early 1970s. The crisis and changing models of society paved the way for new spatial paradigms, in the form of smaller-scale or mixed housing developments. Due to their limited maintenance and technical and architectural quality, today, many large-scale social estates are facing renovation. Dismissing these renovations as beaten tracks would do injustice to careful architectural and urban design efforts for creating typological variety and morphological innovation, emphasizing scenic qualities, or improving energy performance and water storage capacity. Nevertheless, large-scale social estates remain subject to persistent social-spatial assumptions. Statements on public spaces that are difficult to ‘defend’ (Newman, 1972), or impossible to appropriate, a social mix that is ‘endangered’, a lacking ecological imperative, remain part and parcel in regeneration discourses. In this webinar we want to unpack these commonplaces, looking for new entries and outlooks, based on changing lifestyles and new imaginaries.
Agenda
Introduction (5’)
Pilot project SoHoLab: Dominique Lefrançois (10’)
Mirror project: Anne Lacaton, Lacaton & Vasal (10’)
Keynote lecture: Paola Vigano, Studio Paola Vigano, EPFL, IUAV (25’)
Debate (30’)
Summary (5’)
Visit http://www.soholab.org/news/soholab-webinars for more information and to register
The SoHoLab project was a 3-year research addressing resident involvement, local knowledge and stakeholder collaboration in the context of the regeneration of large-scale social estates. The project identified Urban Living Labs as potentially innovative approaches to launch open and collaborative processes in the policy context of urban regeneration. Considering multiple failures of so-called ‘participatory approaches’, the SoHolab tried to find out which tools and methods could be applied in order to more effectively open up the policy design and implementation phases for local voices, topics and concerns. By evaluating and developing Living Lab approaches in different contexts, the three research units involved focused on defining research and practice characteristics supporting more participatory regeneration processes. In this webinar series, we want to disseminate the knowledge acquired during three years of research, entering in
dialogue with similar practices, while addressing open questions and venues for further research.