Sunum
AAA - Co-producing the City
1 Mar 2014 13:00 – 14:30
R-Urban is a bottom-up strategy initiated by aaa to enhance urban resilience capacity by introducing a network of resident-run facilities which create complementarities between key fields of everyday activities (economy, housing, urban agriculture, culture). R-Urban initiates locally closed ecological cycles that will support the emergence of alternative models of living, producing and consuming between the urban and the rural.
To overcome the current crises (climate, resources, economic, demographic), we must, as philosopher Andre Gorz says, ‘produce what we consume and consume what we produce’. This balance between production and consumption through local sustainable sourcing cannot occur without changes in the way we live. R-Urban introduces collaborative practices which support each other through local networks and form resilient flows, networks and circuits of production and consumption.
atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) is a collective platform based in Paris, conducting actions and research on urban mutations and emerging practices in the contemporary city, founded by Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu in 2001. Their projects focus on issues of self-organisation and self-management of collective spaces, emerging networks and catalyse urban processes, resistance to profit driven development, recycling and ecologically friendly architecture, to collective production of knowledge and alternative culture.
Recent projects includeECObox and Passage 56 in Paris, as well as the trans-local PEPRAV (European Platform for Alternative Practice and Research on the City) and Rhyzom (a network of cultural practices). Currently aaa is developing R-Urban, a participative strategy of urban resilience in the metropolitan Parisian suburbia, through a pilot project supported by the EC innovation programme Life+.
Publications edited by aaa include Urban Act, a handbook for alternative practices (2007) and Trans-Local-Act: cultural practices within and across(2010).
aaa has been laureate of the Zumtobel Prize for Research and Initiative 2012, Curry Stone Design Prize 2012, the European Prize for Urban Public Space 2010 and the Prix Grand Public des Architectures Contemporaines en Metropole Parisienne 2010.