Circle of Embrace
A community repairing through green development
A. Sioli (TU Delft - Situated Architecture)
Aleksandar Staničić (TU Delft - Situated Architecture)
P.H.M. Jennen (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / AE+T)
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Abstract
To repair some of the social inequalities in the neighborhood of Bijlmermeer, at the Southeast side of Amsterdam, Kring Brasa—a non-profit community organization—has been working on the project the Gardens of Brasa. The Gardens are meant to give local residents access to a shared green area which they can develop according to their cultural and social needs. Our recent master level studio course, “Designing with Others,” collaborated with the community towards this future. The students designed and partially built a lightweight structure to serve as a community center. The course was designed in close collaboration with the community, over multiple meetings, in which hopes, aspirations, and concerns were exchanged. Recent community-design scholarship (like the notions of collective bricolage and transversal participation) offered an overall theoretical framework in guiding the students through the process of particiaptory design. In this paper we present a short history of the area’s troubled past (an unfortunate case of non-participatory design) and explain the conditions that brough Kring Brasa together. We then explain the process behind the design of the studio course, its main challenges and shortcomings. We conclude discussing how a studio course based on paticipatory design can educate socially responsible designers.