Plug-Ins

Manzini Ezio

Description

This book’s central argument is that plug-ins, situated design outcomes that aim to enrich the complex system of the city and expand its potentialities, are a solid yet supple conceptual framework for rethinking how design can be a key agent in city making.

This book showcases some of the projects developed by Elisava’s Design for City Making Research Lab, a research institute that investigates the role of design in the material and social construction of our habitats, focusing on spatiality, temporality, interactions, meaning, citizen engagement and social impact. Projects by students, professors and researchers, in collaboration with multiple partners including the public administration, NGOs, industry and academy, articulate the concept of design as plug-ins as the core idea of this book. This notion of plug-ins results from a renewed approach to how design can be a key agent in city making. Given that the city is a system of relationships, design for city making means understanding, reinforcing and articulating this network. We posit plug-ins as situated design outcomes that aim to enrich the complex system of the city and expand its potentialities. This book’s central argument is that plug-ins are a solid yet supple conceptual framework for rethinking design’s agency in the city – the main aim of Elisava’s Design for City Making Research Lab.

With Contributions of Ruedi Baur, Julia Benini, Josep Bohigas, David Bravo, Adrià Carbonell, Tomás Díez, Danae Esparza, Ramon Faura, Tona Monjo, Salvador Rueda, Oscar Tomico, Lluís Torrens, Manuela Valtchanova

Sujets

• urban planning
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Actar D
• Date de parution: 07 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781638400950
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Plug-ins Design for City Making in Barcelona





Plug-ins Design for City Making in Barcelona
Ezio Manzini, Albert Fuster, Roger Paez Ramon Faura, Ed.


Published by Actar
A project by Elisava





Opening
This book showcases some of the projects developed by Elisava’s Design for City Making Research Lab, a research institute that investigates the role of design in the material and social construction of our habitats, focusing on spatiality, temporality, interactions, meaning, citizen engagement and social impact. Elisava Research has been exploring the design for city making concept since 2017, and some of its milestones include the exhibition D ×CM , in Barcelona (Elisava 2018), the book Operative Mapping: Maps as Design Tools (Actar 2019), the public events The City of Inter-actions (in collaboration with Barcelona City Council 2019), the research projects Civic Placemaking (financed by La Caixa Foundation 2018-2022), FURNISH (financed by EIT 2020-2022) and Open Schools (financed by Erasmus+ 2022), and the book you now have in your hands. The Design for City Making Research Lab researches and tests the expanded capabilities and the growing relevance of design disciplines to contribute to a better city for all.
The concept of design as plug-ins is the core idea of this book. This notion of plug-ins results from a renewed approach to how design can be a key agent in city making. Given that the city is a system of relationships, design for city making means understanding, reinforcing and articulating this network. We posit plug-ins as situated design outcomes that aim to enrich the complex system of the city and expand its potentialities. Based on the effects these plug-ins produce in an urban system, their role can be that of a generator (introducing new elements in a pre-existing urban context, transforming initial conditions and opening up new expectations and possibilities); a mediator (distilling existing practices into new landscapes and producing new relationships that activate the urban system); and an identifier (recognizing, visualizing and describing existing spaces and practices, contributing to maintaining or enhancing a level of conscious urban awareness). This book’s central argument is that plug-ins are a solid yet supple conceptual framework for rethinking design’s agency in the city –the main aim of Elisava’s Design for City Making Research Lab.





A Possible Instruction Manual
This book can be understood as the addition of four layers.
Layer One: Core Text
The first layer is the core text, written by Ezio Manzini, Albert Fuster and Roger Paez; it offers a theoretical, speculative and cultural framework for the material generated by the Elisava D ×CM initiative over the course of three years.
Layer Two: Guest articles
In the first part, the central text is enriched with contributions from other authors (Bravo, Bohigas, Baur, Faura, Torrens, Díez, Carbonell and Rueda) who, in their “interferences”, offer a reply or an elaboration, or provide a complementary viewpoint.
In the second part, the catalog, five texts written by Elisava faculty members with ties to D ×CM (Monjo, Tomico, Benini, Esparza and Valtchanova) expand on the reflections from the first part, focusing on the specific projects in which they were involved.
Layer Three: Images
The final layer focuses on the projects. Given the impossibility of explaining each of the almost 100 projects in detail, we offer a collection of images from a selection of projects to portray, in broad strokes, the social, urban and experimental imaginary of the D ×CM . The images are organized into three parts (one for each type of plug-in: identifier , mediator , generator ), which, like the guest contributions, spark a dialogue with the all the texts in the book, interfering with them.
Layer Four: Catalogue
The second part is an indexed catalogue of most of the projects that were developed.
Search Engine
The catalog that opens the second part of the book indexes each project (project leaders, stakeholders, educational context), but it also works as a search engine for locating information about the indexed projects, whether in the central text, in the interferences, in the images, or, of course, in the texts written from the front lines.





DESIGN FOR CITY MAKING
Why the City?
Clean Cars Don’t Exist David Bravo
Directions Josep Bohigas
Plug-ins and Complex Systems
From the Society of Care to the Society of Empowerment Ruedi Baur
THE CITY OF THINGS
Collective Space
Temporality
ALL THAT IS EPHEMERAL ALSO MELTS INTO AIR Ramon Faura Coll
CODA
THE CITY OF INTERACTIONS
Encounters, Conversations and Communities
Social Superblocks Lluís Torrens
Infrastructuring
THE CITY OF MEANINGS
Materiality
Imagining Emergent Futures for Cities and Their Bioregions Tomás Díez
Identity
NAVIGATING COMPLEXITY
Engendering Practices
Urban Systems and Plug-ins
Recentering Territorial Design Adrià Carbonell
The Materiality of Hybrid Space
The Topology of Cities and Sustainability
Towards a City of Care
Design as Plug-in
GREEN SPACES IN BARCELONA Salvador Rueda
PROJECT CATALOGUE
Communities Of Production Oscar Tomico and Danielle Wilde
Research through Design, Design through Research Danae Esparza
Decidim × Elisava Tona Monjo
The Silver Lining of a Pandemic Julia Benini and T.C.L.
SCALES OF DESIGN EXPANSION Manuela Valtchanova
BIBLIOGRAPHIES


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part i
DESIGN FOR CITY MAKING (introduction)
This book presents design research on urban regeneration and on the contribution that design can offer. The activities on which it is based took place in the framework of Design for City Making ( d × cm ): a platform started in 2018 by Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering.
The city in which and with which we operated is Barcelona: a city with its own unique and unmistakable character. But which, at the same time, is also representative of an urban typology definable as low rise- high density: a dense city in which density is more horizontal than ver- tical. There are good reasons to assert that this urban form offers a better balance between livability and environmental sustainability. And it is precisely for this reason that Barcelona is an excellent testbed to experiment with urban regeneration initiatives that are also concrete steps towards resilience and sustainability. 1
This book therefore delves into density and diversity; the built city and the lived city; social innovation and public policies — all through the prism of what design can do to contribute to the desired city. And it does so by describing a city in which new artefacts and processes are inserted into the existing urban fabric to reconnect parts that have been torn apart, to reinforce parts that are weak, to consolidate parts that are already strong, and to enrich the city with new possibilities.
In this discussion, the book talks about design and its role as a city making plug-in. In other words, design is conceived as a component (hard or soft) that adds a specific feature to an existing system: the city.


This book is an explicit contribution to a radically important issue: how to make cities and human set- tlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The relevance and timeliness of this approach align with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Develop- ment Goals, “adopted by all United Nations Mem- ber States in 2015, providing a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.” (UN SDG11 Sustainable Cities and Communities).


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United Nations 2018; United Nations 2019.
We owe this conceptual shortcut to informal exchanges with David Bravo. For the core idea that social fairness should be necessarily related to envi- ronmental sustainability and vice versa. See: Dob- son, 1999; Pelletier 2010, 1887-1894; and Bravo, Schrader, Yera 2012, 119-136.


Specifically, this book discusses how design contributes to the qual- ity of the urban fabric (both material and relational) in which it acts by opening up opportunities and creating favorable conditions for the interaction between people; between people and places; and, hopefully, between people and the Earth — that is, between people and that wider intertwining of human and non-human relationships of which we are a part. Our experiences operating in Barcelona have led to the recog- nition of a meta-typology of design processes and outcomes, which we have called plug-ins , whose characteristics seem generalizable to all morphologically compact and socially dense cities. This proposal takes as its foundation the following reflection: if the city is a system of rela- tionships, design for city making means reinforcing and ar