Urban Act. A Handbook for Alternative Praxis
Presentation by Doina Petrescu (atelier d'architecture autogérée) and guests
Urban Act presents a European network of practices who act within the urban public sphere as a place for political change and architectural practice, introducing their different projects, tools and methods. It not only locates and maps the activities of numerous practices, but is structured as a manual to allow insight into the methods of interventionist urban practice, like a user guide to "do-it-yourself urbanism".
The practices presented include artist groups, media activists, cultural workers, software designers, architects, students, researchers, neighbourhood organisations, city dwellers. Most of these groups are usually catalogued as "local" and their position is minimalised as such, but in fact they are highly specific and have the quality of reinventing uses and practices in ways that traditional professional structures cannot afford (due to their generic functioning). Their ways of being local are complex and multilayered, involving participation and "local expertise" as well as extra-local collaborations. They reinvent contemporary urban practice as "tactical", "situational" and "active", based on soft professional and artistic skills and civic informal structures, which can adapt themselves to changing urban situations that are critical, reactive and creative enough to produce real change.
www.peprav.net
www.urbantactics.org