Urban Matters Hub

Urban Matters Hub is a project that we designed with Tuğçe Karataş and made its first installation at the City Link Festival in Copenhagen, in 2017.

UMH is an inflatable strusture that locates itself on the street and changes according to the users’ need. The structure helps its users by the user guide in order to make them build new systems. It dissappears without a trace when its service is done.

Year: 2017
Location: Karens Minde, Kopenhag
Status: Completed
Client: City Link Fest
Services: Inflatable, Mobile Structure Design
Collaborator: Tuğçe Karataş, Design Atlas
Contributors: Tuğçe Karataş, Bihter Çelik, Merve Bakır, Beril Odabaşı, Yasmin Larsson
Photos: Lorin Camarago
Video: Aytekin Gezici

UHM project started with asking these questionings:

  • Local authority designs the public space in general. All the additional or contrary interventions are obliged to be secondary because of the difference of intensity. The intermediate forms are required to multiplex that alternative moves.
  • There is culture, it may bear, advance, leave a trace. The space being a part of the culture and ensuring a place may bear, advance and leave a memory-trace.
  • It is important the dwellers take the floor about the physical components in the public space. Managing the additional achievements and acquisitions by themselves is valuable besides.

In the light of the observations above, a ‘nomad’ space which has an autonomous government, attaches to the public space and occupies a place there with its existence, violates right temporarily but leaves by giving several benefits in return, the user holds its limits is required. The service system of the nomad space should include learnable general basics. According to the locality, its spatial rules can develop autonomously.

Politics and aesthetics of public space are changing. The intermediate forms are required to multiplex spontaneous interventions. Yet, there is a culture of space which may bear, advance, leave a trace. It is important the dwellers take the floor about the physical components in the public space. A ‘nomad’ space which has an autonomous government, attaches to the public space and occupies a place there with its existence, violates right temporarily but leaves by giving several benefits in return, the user holds its limits is required. The circular design of the nomad space should include knowledge exchange. According to the locality, its spatial rules can develop autonomously.

The current way of developing cities seem neither sustainable nor liveable in the long run. Cities are increasingly faced with wicked sustainability problems such as overconsumption, flooding, heat islands, pollution and congestion and liveability problems such as poverty, crime and mixophobia. The traditional forms of urban development are hard pushed to find solutions to these problems, but are faced with the paradox that it is hard to plan for something that we do not already know. The future requires new ways of thinking and doing. Crisis situations that we are facing today in modern world, encouraged me to review proj- ects such as the Instant City at Ibiza, a project by José Miguel de Prada Poole. Built in 1971, on the occasion of the International Design Congress ICSID, it consisted of a pneumatic city designed to accommodate the participant students of the congress. The Instant City was located in 15000 m2 zone, designed with cheap plastic and easy junction techniques, aiming to completely disappear after its use.

For Urban Matters Hub, we were inspired by the experimental Instant City project and we designed it as an installation which is peculiar to its space. Urban Matters Hub was selected as one of the four international projects for Experimental Cities Conference during the City Link Fest. It was located in Sydhavnen, Copenhagen during the City Link Festival between 21th and 24th of September 2017. UMH was produced in Istanbul by using the same techniques and materials as Instant City and designed to be flexible for changements by its users during the festival according to their needs.

The project aimed to make the individual learn that s/he can intervene to the public space with her/his own decision. And it tries to verificate the information that the individual should be always active for the public weal by providing new socialising opportunities.

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