Networked Urbanism

design thinking initiatives for a better urban life

Design critics: Belinda Tato and Jose Luis Vallejo, principals of Ecosistema Urbano

The project aims to enliven multiple elevational voids of the city of Muharraq, engaging various users who bring an array of programs over a continuously evolving spectrum of time.
As the city of Muharraq contains urban voids, the voids in plan also create elevational voids that expose blank wall facades. These blank facades, composed of brick or concrete walls, reflect sunlight to heat the city, especially with the current programmatic function as parking lots.

The project works with the juxtaposition of a light new scaffold structure against heavy existing solids. The public realm becomes an ongoing project that gets built up or down according to the user’s own needs. A set of users, all with different occupations, age group, and gender, can easily building up their own stall according to an ikea-like set of procedures. The accumulation of these stall-scaffolds can create an elevational market space, theater, or educational facility according to the user’s needs in different times of the year. Addressing the locale, the construction and deconstruction is part of the process of making the public space, the time and effort both an architectural construct. The narrowness of the scaffolds and the delicate textile skin are reminiscent of the old Meshirabyas, a balcony-type of finely detailed artifice. As its Arabic root of the word Meshirabya suggests “the place of drinking,” the project acts as a shade or screen with allows breeze to enter and create a cooled area for filtration and concoction of water as well as traditional beverages like Limonana, or Mint Lemonade.

These scaffolds bring life to the adjacent rooftops, creating a network of new public arena that continues the Arabic tradition of living in verticality. A newly established visual network will not only infill the elevational voids to reduce heating, but also activate the locale to create proximate destinations for people to sell, buy, or socialize. Each of these sites will respond with different programmatic functions over courses of years. Depending on their traditional character of the neighborhood, programs could range from a market in the Suq neighborhood to a space of worship and prayer near the Mosque. The multiplicity of program as a respondent to the locale of the place situates program on an underlying level of necessity. Program emerges from the needs of the users.

Final Present by Yoonjee Koh


PROJECT STATEMENT

The problem is the future strain on Portland’s transportation infrastructure, due to the expected population growth of 1 million people by the year 2040.

Portland is expecting to become denser, and though Portland’s population has increased, the congestion of traffic has not. This is due to Portland’s predominant bike culture. Portland is America’s biking capital, with a bicycle commuter rate of 6.3% vs. the national average of 0.61%. There is already an existing system of bicycle pathways through the city of Portland, so building new infrastructure is not the way to generate more cyclists.

Our intent is to help Portland reach the modal split goal of 25% bicycle trips taken by the population inside the metro area. (more…)


We have created page accounts to go along with our app. This allows for deeper connection and to get the ball rolling on creating this app as a marketable item. Also along with the use of Facebook and Twitter as base pages, we have created a hashtag that goes along with our app and pages to further group conversations and connections.

https://www.facebook.com/bikingportland

https://twitter.com/BikingPDX

#bportland

flyer

 

 

Here is a mapped out version of the development of the Bike PDX app so far…

Tree of App


Meeting event in Tottubella anna maria zandara


Our new brand zandara anna maria


In order to present our new brand for a new market project in the Nurra area, we planned a meeting event in Tottubella, published on project’s Facebook page called “Tottu in Pares Tottubella” (Sardinian language sentence for “All together Tottubella”).

We printed out several flyiers to show citizens how the project could be developed and which step we could pass trhough to get the goal.

Flyiers

Once there we met some guys who are interested into partecipate and we found out there is an Volountary Association called “Alfa uno”, who are going to help us in order to realize our project. They offered us to meet each other together with their president, some members and the young guys, who welcomed us, in one own house of them. When we were sitting at the table all together, we had the chance to present and propose our project, distribuiting our flyiers to each one of them, and having a nice and peaceful conversation about the aim and the way to realize a real market event in TottuBella at the end of June.

They offerd us to clean up and set up an old abandoned kindergarten, that is now a storage but unused by citizen, even if it is a public building.

meeting

We planned better a strategy to produce something really different and we tried to figure out who could be the key people for the event, also realizing which activities we could really produce without paying any taxes.

In order to produce a flexible prototype for the market desk we tried to check which material we could have for free and how we could have them. Citizens seemed to be very interested and involved in the process, so far.

We are looking forward to go further and push the work to produce a real social and economical movement in the Nurra area.

 

 


Our project has a name and a logo!!

Here it is!!! It comes out from a words-game between english and Sardinian language meaning “Meet in Market“. Where “meeting” becomes “Meet-in” and “market” becomes “Marchaddu” (in Sardinian language) and then a short versione as “Marchà” —> MEET-IN MARCHÀ

Logo Meet-in Marchà

Let’s start to share it and make it working!!


networkedurbanism.com is a platform for sharing knowledge and design thinking experiences with the world around us, breaking through the walls of academia in an attempt to improve the society in which we live.