No purpose city : sketching the affordances of informality
(2025)
author(s): Malte Leon Sonnenschein
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
MA Interior Architecture (INSIDE)
In investigating the meaning, tasks, and opportunities of public spaces, this thesis is dealing with those parts of public realm whose lack of infrastructure inhibits their usability. Surrounded by function-driven urban areas, I identify those as no purpose cities within the city. I propose a working method that sketches, models, and experiments with such spaces to test their affordances in one-to-one. I claim that constant change is a necessity for a successful and relevant public sphere, as statically designed spaces cannot live up to the needs of a constantly changing, fluid society. The activist designer extends the experientiality by exploring the direct usability of no purpose spaces. In defining this design position the urgent need for the work of active spatial designers is proven, as they play an agile role in the fabric of urban development processes.
Under the Mirroring Surface
(2018)
author(s): Adam Kraft
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In my work I experiment with interventional urban commons, through practices of altering and re-purposing existing structures. The work is both informal and transgressive in its methodology, with the core intention to investigate and participate in the shaping and making of the social city. Art and research can provide keys to accessing such a city in the making; a space where we can challenge the preconceptions of what is possible, and to imagine alternative strategies for the creation of realities.
This article presents a theoretical frame work together with a number of strategies practiced under the Lefebvrian concept of the ‘Right to the City.’
