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“FUSION CITIES – consolidation of movement” was an urban design seminar at TU Darmstadt in 2009.

Two cities divided by a border are growing together. The moving particles of this inter-cultural exchange leave their footprint in the landscape – the urban landscape. A border is a thin line between them, an area like an enclave or an undefined moving line, sometimes not even visible.
In the course we have analyzed the original state of the cities and how it got reformed by the exchange through the years.
What is strongly restricted by the border? (people, goods, …)
What does not care about the border? (internet, climate, geography, culture …)
Switching from border and flows (network/negative space) to city (footprint/positive space) and back again we have drawn maps and diagrams to compare the several pairs of fusion cities.

During the seminar of the summer term 2009 at PAR, TU Darmstadt, the students analyzed four different types of borders: natural, artificial, political, and social. Three analytical steps were taken by the students: borders, cities, movements to then finally distill a still image ‘consolidation of movement’.

BRAKIN_natural : Brazzaville and Kinshasa by Humerto Sarabio and Marion Bouchard
SAN JUANA_artificial : San Diego and Tijuana by Julio Obregon Zepeda and Anne Touchet
JERUSALEM_political : East and West Jerusalem by Slobodan Suboti? and Petko Gogov
FAVEMINIO_social : Favela and Condominio in Rio de Janeiro by Eleni Sougaris

Intro on ‘borders’ by Kathrin Wieck, organizer of BORDERlining, TU Berlin, Traila
Cover by Deniz Köse // sponsored by dm.folien.com
Music “Todo amor do Mundo” (ft. CDala, Avery Fantom, Stefsax, Colab, BillRay Drums, Anchor Mejans, Greg Baumont, Furkosbot) by shagrugge @ ccMixter.org
all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) in 2009.
Seminar by Jula-Kim Sieber.

The language of this book here is mostly visual, which enables the viewer to an intuitive comparison of each of the fusion cities and the analytical steps.

you can see all the results at our blog FUSION CITIES and download the PDF and listen to the audio-files of FAVEMINIO online.

Keywords: social, artificial, congo, political, condominio

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under communication, urbanism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.