March 2024
Infrastructuring Assemblies
Taught by Prof. Dr. Markus Miessen and Dr. César Reyes Nájera
Speaker’s corner. Hyde Park, London. X P Gomes, 2008.
During the Spring Semester, students will be confronted with an exercise of urban analysis and hands-on proposal for a specific space in Esch-sur-Alzette. This city, at the former heart of the European steel industry, transformed from a small village following rapid growth during the second half of the nineteenth century. After the decline of the steel industry towards the late 1980s, the city has been experiencing a transition from an industry-based economy to one based on service and knowledge.
The establishment of the University of Luxembourg at the western edge of the municipal territory next to the steel industry remains detached from the city’s historic urban body. It also poses challenges in mobility and housing solutions for the growing student population. The city has been addressing such challenges developing master plans and infrastructure interventions seeking the cohesion of the scattered poles of the city, while attempting to transition to climate neutrality. This effort is heavily conditioned by the logics of neoliberal economy and the pre-eminence of the free market that increases social and spatial inequalities as well as weakens the public sphere, resulting with the loss of political agency of under-represented social groups.
As part of this Design Studio, students will critically address how urban infrastructures are not inert materialities, but – instead – are linked to specific forms of management and governance, to particular customs and agreements, to personal and collective experiences, to social gatherings, and finally to memories and identities, as pointed by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. Students will also analyse uncertain spaces driven by spontaneous encounters and informality – spaces that have not succumbed entirely to the pressures of planning productivity or the individualistic protocols of the free market. These spaces ought to be understood as zones of affinities and difference(s), fuelled by conflict and dissensus but maintained by care and empathy. This include temporary spatial configurations for everyday politics, contributing to dismantling the notion that urban spatial production is an autonomous object with singular authorship – whether in existing public venues, in small bars, or in a corner of a park – they constitute a zone of promise(s) to confront the apathy and disenchantment brought by social polarisation, precariousness, and the uncertainties of future urban conviviality.
Teaching team:
Markus Miessen, César Reyes Nájera
City partners:
Municipality City of Esch, Copenhagen Architecture Festival – CAFx, Malmö stad
Collaborators:
Chrissie Muhr, Finn Williams, Gustav Eden, Gustav Kjær Vad Nielsen, Josephine Michau, Søren Nørkjær Bang.
Students:
Altamash Baig Muhammad, Muhammad Hamza, Leandra Vanessa Jung Santos, Mariia Leonenko, Sandrine Nef, Emmanuel Adesola Ogundiran, Chiara Pasquarelli, Cindy Seminario Fernandez, Sreenidhi Wupadrasta.
Design template:
Marcel Strauß
