Cooperative Architecture. Urban Transformation as Process, Design as Research Method, Space as Dialogue.
Book Launch and Discussion, moderated by Alesa Mustar with author Riccarda Cappeller
What if cities are not designed, but co-written layer by layer?
What if architectural thinking begins with a dialogue instead of a drawing?
Cooperative Architecture traces how architecture can emerge through relational processes of co-creation, co-habitation, and collective authorship. It reimagines the city not as a fixed object of design, but as a living field of improvisation, repair, and care. In the book three exemplary sites of urban transformation are discussed: Granby Four Streets in Liverpool, Can Batlló in Barcelona, and ExRotaprint in Berlin. Each case unfolds as a laboratory of practice, demonstrating how architecture can become a performative and transformative cooperative act.
Cappeller demonstrates how artistic strategies and design-based thinking, driven by an ethnographical methodology, from situated writing, visual mapping, and documentary filmmaking, can develop exemplary ways to conduct architectural design research to curate urban situations. Cooperative Architecture highlights the invisible grounds of space, from social traces and relations to urban processes of transformation and shared rhythms.
Dr. Riccarda Cappeller is trained as architect at Bauhaus Universität Weimar, ETSAM Madrid, UBA Buenos Aires and as visual sociologist at Goldsmiths University London. She teaches and researches @territorialdesign, Leibniz University Hannover and directed courses and workshops at MA Coop Design Research in Dessau, ETSAB Barcelona, UNIVPM Ancona. Her interest is in design theory and methodology, exploring processes of urban change and knowledge creation through artistic and design-driven approaches and documentary formats. In parallel she works as freelance author and curator.
Alesa Mustar is situated at the intersection of curating, urban research, and teaching. With a background in Architecture and Urbanism and an MA in Spatial Sociology, her work engages artistic inquiry and sociopolitical critique. Focusing on informal urbanism, crisis geographies, and politics of spatial agency, she is attentive to collective forces, fragile infrastructures, and everyday negotiations shaping cities. Her practice—bridging research, critical curating, and embedded practice in Lebanon and Argentina—underpins a teaching throughline from UdK Berlin via HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd and TH Dortmund to TH Lübeck.
Cooperative Architecture. Urban Transformation as Process, Design as Research Method, Space as Dialogue
Riccarda Cappeller
AADR / Spurbuch Verlag 2025
