Displaced City

A Displaced City is an area within a city that is inhabited by people forced to live there due to social reasons.  Park Hill is a housing development in Sheffield that was occupied by lower class people that did not have the choice to live there.  They had all the amenities they could need on site so they were able to avoid the ‘real’ city of Sheffield.  Nowa Huta, is another micro city of a town in Poland called Krakow.  It originated by being a self-servicing town for the steel workers of the steel works and has remained a very separate area to the rest of Krakow.  Park Hill and Nowa Huta are examples of a Displaced City.  If you are a resident or a visitor, you do not feel you are experiencing the city, there are boundaries that constrain you.  

Boundaries

Boundaries within cities can be physical or invisible.  Physical boundaries take up space and can be passed by or moved through; wall, ditch, river, gate, highway, check point, refugee camp, buffer zone, new development, abandoned village, untouchable area, former wall.  Invisible boundaries are spaces within cities that you are made aware by your feelings; interrupted, restricted, selected, filtered, intermittent, transitionary, isolated, mixed, unidirectional, continuous, discontinuous, displaced.   These two boundaries can both evoke emotional responses.   



Have your say

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>




Safari hates me

About

Studio Six, MArch School of Architecture,

University of Sheffield

The work of  Studio Six is linked to the Interdependence Day project, (www.interdependenceday.co.uk)

launched in 2006 to reinvigorate sustainability debates and to question some of the technocratic outcomes of seeing ecological and economic concerns as an accounting or ‘problem solving’ challenge.

What can architecture contribute to this attempt to reconsider global, economic and environmental issues?

Interdependent understanding invites an architecture rooted in creativity and metaphor, which ‘listens’ to the potential of a city rather than imposing mark marketable criteria of enterprise, lifestyle or efficiency. This architecture is based on conversations between the city and its varied inhabitants, and in an awareness of its social, economic and ecological metabolism.

The interdependencies of a place may be understood as a particularly dynamic and complex constellation of social, economic and emotional relations, but the term also has ambitions for a sense of a place that is extroverted and unexpected. Interdependence includes a consciousness of links with the wider world integrating in a positive way the near and far, the local and the global, the human and the ecological.

The studio will instigate alternative modes of architectural collaboration, representation, and communication that are more open and amateur rather than specialised or expert. We will be exploring an architecture of ‘making-do’ and of ‘provisional construction’.

The studio has been exploring the ’steel cities’ of Nowa Huta and Sheffield but we have also been thinking about other cities, about state responsibility, about carnival, about pigeons…     Renata Tyszczuk