Prototyping the City
Dan Hill looks at pop-ups as a form of R&D for the city.
Apps like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and Citymapper radically change the perception and performance of space, also without building a single edifice, infrastructural or otherwise. And that is before augmented reality really takes root. The city is beginning to be changed by software far more radically than by building.
As temporal structures, pop-ups usually leave no trace on the city and have no ambition to change urban processes, cultures and activities. However, they should be seen as learning opportunities that engage communities and inform positive changes in city architecture, suggests Dan Hill in his article “A Sketchbook for the City to Come”.
A good example for how pop-ups can enable experimentation in the cities is ‘Pop-up Restaurant Day’ in Helsinki. It happened simply as a result of an agreement within citizens who simultaneously made and sold street food from their apartment windows. As a reaction to the event, the city of Helsinki created an Open Kitchen where people could learn how to run a restaurant, fill in the City forms and obtain funding.
Furthermore, Dan Hill argues that pop-ups could be used as a form of R&D for the city, offering a meaningful role for architecture — in learning from their dynamics (fast) and enabling a more equitable and powerful systemic change (slow). In this way pop-ups become a tool for humanitarian architecture (1) — a medium for conveying social effects where form and design are the means of embedding these social effects into the built environment. ( 2)
Using ‘Pop-up Restaurant Day’ in Helsinki as a case study, the article shows how and the city could learn from and react on pop-ups. However, it misses to explore how pop-ups could be used proactively as a prototyping tool for urban architecture.
References:
- Rory Hyde, in Esther Charlesworth, Humanitarian Architecture, Routledge (New York/Oxon), 2014.
- Shoe polish factory with a conscience wins London building of the year.
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