“There is an increasing consensus that the societal costs of dispersed, low-density and car-dependent suburban developments are too high. To reduce these costs, planners and policy makers are formulating strategies to retrofit suburbs: densifying them, diversifying them or simply erasing them. What they did not expect is that residents would protest: Not In Our Backyards
This reminds us of the ‘60s and ‘70ies when planners and policy makers sanitised complete city parts because they were considered unhealthy, chaotic and ugly. This meant the start of the Right to the City movement (Lefebvre, 1968; Harvey, 2012), assembling citizens to reclaim their neighbourhoods from top-down planning.
The point of departure of this CAPA.CITY autumn school is that we need a new movement Reclaim the Suburbs that supports residents to organise themselves and initiate own retrofitting projects; projects that do reduce the societal costs of their mode of living, but also fit within their housing dream: garage-box entrepreneurs, multi- generational villa-collectives, eco-garden networks, crowdfunded community services or renewable energy cooperatives.” source
Workshop
for CAPA.CITY
by OS Studio
Turnhout (be)
Oct 2019
