The Right to the Void

CONTENT

Within the context of urban densification, voids are precious resources that require careful planning integrating the multiple needs of citizens. In the same way as the built environment, voids, and more generally public spaces, are crucial components of urban quality. EVE seizes the opportunity to experiment with urban voids in the Fribourg conurbation as part of a research project by the TRANSFORM Institute. A temporary appropriation of urban voids in order to prefigure their future is an interesting tool to highlight the stakes of these spaces and to integrate the practices and opinions of users. We will occupy an urban wasteland with self-built interventions, seeking to reveal its potential and qualities as a public space.

TEACHING AIMS

• Be able to establish a needs assessment for a public space
• Develop scenarios for the use of a public space
• Develop your ability to think about public space as a network
• Activate and discover a place in a performative way
• Adopt an activist posture
• Become an actor of sustainable urban development
• Propose an integrative urban design
• Learn to use the design tools of a landscape architect
• Integrate contemporary issues of construction of public space in an ephemeral project

teaching FORMs

The week will start with the surveying of an urban void as a demonstrative and founding performance. Interventions by actors and activists of public space will highlight the issues at the communal and cantonal levels. At the heart of the module’s applied pedagogy, the PopUp experimentation hall located on the site of the former Cardinal brewery will be used for the construction phase of the interventions that will then be installed on the site.