The Self-Organising City v2.0: Worker City Apps

Claudia Pasquero, Marco Poletto

'… the metropolis of the information age is not, then, the capital of technology; it is rather the land of the humane, in all its ability to connect its own DNA with that of business, disseminating its own genes in a tight network of parental and entrepreneurial relations …'
Andrea Branzi

Agenda: As the world is urbanising at a rapid rate and our society is losing its direct connection with the natural and rural landscape, we need to become more efficient in developing novel frameworks of urban self-sufficiency and biodiversity. Our challenge this year is to get real! By combining notions of environmental design, cutting-edge digital technologies, biomimetics and biology we will aim to bridge the boundaries that separate disciplines; to engineer urban design applets; to network spaces involving direct social participation and to incubate urban biodiversity.

Workers' City Apps: Travelling East, all the way to China's new 'product cities', we will investigate the socio-political condition of Chinese migrant workers, following their trajectories in search of a more permanent status as urban dwellers.

We will then conceive workers' city applets, new prototypes of augmented working spaces, constituted by two complementary components: a virtual interface, able to network workers with share-as interests; and a physical interface, the actual factory space.

Portfolio

Students will work in five teams during the first term, designing five workers' cities through the conception of five urban design applets to be tested on Apple's iPad. The concepts will emerge as a response to the reading of the work of the Italian radical group Archizoom and the theorist Andrea Branzi. In the second and third terms students will work individually and design the architectural stages for their applets prompting the factory spaces to evolve into gardens of social cultivation. The final versions of the workers' city apps will be used to present the project portfolio and the most successful applet will be commercialised at the online App Store.

Unit Staff

Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto are co-founders of ecoLogic-Studio (ecologicstudio.com), an architectural and urban design studio based in London. Completed projects include a public library, private villas, large facades and parametric masterplans. ecoLogic- Studio has developed prototypes and installations architectural biennales and it runs international workshops. Claudia and Marco have been Intermediate 10 Unit Masters since 2007 and are directing the new AA Italy global school. Their Systemic Architecture was recently published by Routledge.