April 2024
Field Trip to Copenhagen and Malmö

Just after Easter, the "Infrastructuring Assemblies" Design Studio, focusing on the City of Esch, led by Prof. Dr. Markus Miessen and Dr. César Reyes, embarked on a field trip to Copenhagen and Malmö. Nestled within a dense programme of site-specific investigations and visits of relevant urban-scale projects in both Copenhagen and Malmö, the studio met with project partners in both cities, amongst them: Josephine Michau, Finn Williams, Gustav Eden, Victoria Percovich Gutierrez, and Karl Landin.

As part of this Design Studio, students critically engage with and address how infrastructure interventions are not inert materialities, but – instead – are linked to specific forms of management and governance, to customs and agreements, to personal and collective experiences, to social gatherings, and finally to memories and identities. Students also analyse uncertain spaces driven by spontaneous encounters and informality. These spaces ought to be understood as zones of affinities and difference(s), fuelled by conflict and dissensus but maintained by care and empathy: places for agonistic assemblies, characterised by decentralised power and initiatives seeking spatial justice in cities.