Between November and December 2015 we spent one week in Shenzhen on the occasion of the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, being invited by curators Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner to be part of the Radical Urbanism section of the exhibition. The brief of this edition of the Biennale is “Re-Living the city”, a reflection about reuse and rethinking existing buildings, the reimagination of our cities, and the remaking of our daily lives by design. The main location of the event was connected to the topic of the Biennale: the former Dacheng Flour Factory has been transformed into a massive container of thoughts and innovative practices in urbanism without hiding its recent past of industrial activity and its uncertain future.
Our installation at the UABB Biennale, called Networked Urbanism, displays a selection of pilot projects exploring physical and immaterial urban improvement, a critical catalogue of their urban contexts, the understanding of urban complexity and the new tools developed to address it. The colourful multimedia exhibition displays 10 pilots projects, implemented during the past 10 years in different contexts around the world, but also displays 1 mockup, a real scale version of an urban furniture design.
The Networked Urbanism Installation reflects the working method: an overall strategic vision that relies on short term punctual and powerful interventions in specific and emblematic spots (pilot projects), rather than long term and high resources urban strategies. Ecosistema Urbano’s projects empower people and engage citizens in the tangible transformation of the places where they live.
The definition and final layout of the installation was an intense process of research and real scale experimentation to find interactions between graphic design, communication, animation and optical effects. We tried to show the common philosophy behind each project in a very visual and communicative way. Each pilot project is communicated with a graphic slogan synthesizing the nature of the intervention and its message, a reference to the city where the project is implemented, and a description of the overall urban strategy.
10 pilot projects
Moreover, a digital layer of information is added to the graphic display. 5 multimedia dioramas provide an intriguing representation of the following pilot projects: Exuma Garden of Dreams, Dreamhamar, Asunción Open Lab, Voronezh Sea Revitalization, and Encarnación Sustainable Development Territorial Plan.
The other 5 pilot projects presented in Networked Urbanism installation are described throughout short movies displayed as holograms, thanks to a DIY fascinating technique. The videos of the projects Ecobulevard, Air Tree Shanghai, Ecópolis Plaza, Energy Carousel, Escuela Febres intervention in Cuenca , explain with 3d holograms the complexity of this interventions, showing the different layers and their several possible points of view and configurations.
1 Mockup
Well centered on the main wall of the space lays the message “Customize public space“, surrounded by drawings of the possible configurations of Madrid Chair. In the central area of the exhibition there are 18 pieces of this flexible and multipurpose urban furniture in red and orange versions allowing visitors to interact and create their own favourite exhibition layout.
The UABB Biennale will be open until March 3rd 2016, if you are planning to visit Shenzhen, don’t miss it!