About the workshop
Copenhagen Design Workshop
The workshop and related lecture will explore the idea of “City as Verb”. To investigate this idea, Copenhagen will become an engaged urban laboratory wherein the city is reconceptualised as a 24 hour organism. Through the injection of time and infrastructure as critical considerations in the creation of an inclusive public realm, a new means of understanding the contemporary city will be developed.
On the one hand, considering time as a key design component of public space suggests that public space is conceived and re-conceived through the activity of appropriation and the cultivation of ownership on the part of the citizens of the city. On the other hand, understanding the city as latent infrastructure, and not a collection of individual buildings on separate sites, facilitates the reading of the city as a shifting amenity-scape that continuously unfolds and redefines itself through occupation.
The workshop will engage this intent through the invention of new design tools in public engagement and spatial representation, and towards imagining new definitions of public space.
Imagine the wonderful shift that occurred from the definition of the city by the CIAM group as a bureaucratic and hierarchical mono-functional city, to Peter and Alison Smithson’s vision of the city as a cluster of streets as social condensers. This shift signified the recuperation of the humanity of the city, and the ability for the ordinary to come together to create the extraordinary through people’s actions, reactions and interactions.
The workshop will celebrate this shift and investigate its opportunities within the city of Copenhagen.