Resources explores the relation between the world’s increasingly limited resources and our built environment. Complex issues concerning a future urban environment need multiple approaches and viewpoints, which is why this educational program is multi-disciplinary. The course consists of a series of case-study based urban investigations, in order to embrace the complexity that each specific urban landscape faces. While the themes and geographies vary each year, the combination of aspects that influence the urban landscape are relevant for all contexts and are therefore simultaneously investigated in the workshops, for example socio-economical and demographic patterns and their direct relation to energy production, consumption, policymaking, mobility, eco-systems and climate.
The course is aimed for architects, landscape architects, urban- and regional planners, designers, artists, engineers or other professionals from creative disciplines with a specific interest in issues concerning architecture and urban planning. Applicants should have a master’s degree. In Resources the concept and methodology of design are considered essentially cross-disciplinary and in this sense all participants are designers, regardless of background. A group project is developed sequentially through short workshops that follow throughout the year. A longer study trip is scheduled for the spring and the result of the collaborative project is presented in an exhibition and in a catalogue.
If we look beyond state- and private property driven developments, which have dominated cities during the last fifty years, throughout Europe we can encounter a rich tradition of cities and communities formed on the principles of the commons. Today, when the way out of the debt crises is seen in even more draconic privatization and thus “evaporation” of public property, can the re-constitution of the commons be a viable option pointing to new directions for our cities – beyond the agenda of profit and away from the neo-liberalization that brought us where we are?
We are looking for engaged participants/professionals would be eager to join on a journey throughout Europe and Sweden, to investigate the state of commons, meet protagonists of ground breaking practices, in a quest that would lead to an international conference in the spring of 2013.
