ar2com

How can ancient cities benefit from the UNESCO world heritage badge and simultaneously avoid becoming a ‘Walt Disney’ for tourists?

There are fears that the UNESCO world heritage badge is being used to start a marketing campaign, based merely on capitalist standards. The common requirement for a rapid return on investment (ROI), however, leads to rapid development and rules out slow-growing and steady sustainability – and deprives local people of having a say during the city’s ‘rehabilitation’. In fact, here we don’t deal with rehabilitation but with reconstruction similar to a set stage fit to serve photo sessions by tourists.
Figure 1: ‘Damascus Barcode’
As to the Walt Disney reference, this was the general concern in an urban design studio at PAR. To simplify the theoretical task we chose the following UNESCO sites: Damascus, Syria, for the winter term 2008 / 2009 and Sana’a, Yemen, for the winter term 2009 / 2010 (still in progress). Understanding is the main base for a sustainable design in foreign cultures: learners – teachers, designers – researchers, locals – professionals, and so on are all communicating directly using all possible web 2.0 achievements. The students learnt how to access research communities and the local Damascene community to work out relevant propositions, which place(d) themselves in between ‘urban acupuncture’ and ‘slow urbanism’.
Our final presentation in Damascus proved this working method ideal and effective.

UNESCO Walt Disney Download (119)

dreaming of …

THANKS FOR CELEBRATING!!!

choreo … agnes sitompul
I-Beatz … ingrid tietz, boris lempka, elena orth, agnes sitompul, pascal kuderewski
funkstarz: silvia neveril, thomas friedrich, ina hoffman, gerhard pilschke, elke wagner
camera … tim ubaldo, elham massuod
towel … druckamt.de
music … Techno Mahal

Three years of a vivid interaction in cyper- and real spaces!
Here I am to recall the three best episodes of ar2com:

Let’s talk about the World-Wide Crisis!
an interview with Terry Lynn, singer from Waterhouse, Kingston, Jamaica on how to fight against urban violence with music

Arquitetura do Movimento (the architecture of movement)
Three interviews with Andrea Jabor on how easy going can be communication and interaction in architectural and urban space.

FUSION CITIES – consolidation of movement
two bordering cities are growing together (a seminar at TU Darmstadt)
BRAKIN_natural : Brazzaville and Kinshasa, SAN JUANA_artificial : San Diego and Tijuana, JERUSALEM_political : East and West Jerusalem, FAVEMINIO_social : Favela and Condominio in Rio de Janeiro

“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.