By addressing the question “How can we envision the in-between city?” The exhibition explores how a more inclusive urbanism can be created or initiated through considered spatial and constructed configurations in selected sites along the contested Cikapundung riverscape – a prominent green urban corridor lined with dense informal settlements – by integrating architectural, urban design and landscape architecture interventions. The design studio exhibition is part of the joint summer school that took place in Bandung, Indonesia, between 27.09 -09.10.2019, organized in partnership with Melbourne School of Design and Bandung Institute of Technology.
Click HERE to access the virtual Exhibition
The TravelLing Studio
Our ability to understand, learn from, and respond to urban informality through our design engagements are critical for the future of cities in fast developing economies. These cities are the key context of our urbanising century. They are experiencing unprecedented expansions and much of this expansion and growth manifest in squatter settlements, slums and vibrant street commerce that operate within a large ‘shadow’ informal economy.
Indonesian cities’ rapid urban growths are consistent with this phenomenon, with the globalization induced urban forms and development practices layered onto colonial and indigenous urban fabrics. In contemporary Neoliberal economic practice, the trend is that the differences become more polarized and spaces become more fragmented as the area is increasingly gentrified for upper middle class and tourist consumption. Can alternative design approaches and articulations resist this tendency of polarisation of the city into the affluent formally developed urban neighbourhood and the underclass informal others? Can issues of equitable right to live in the city and the formal imagining of urban future be critically and creatively addressed through planning and design?
Against this background, the Institut Teknologi Bandung, The University of Melbourne and The University of Stuttgart organised a joint Summer School in Bandung between 27.09-09.10.2019 to explore how a more inclusive urbanism can be created or initiated through considered spatial and constructed configurations in selected sites along the contested the Cikapundung riverscape, a prominent green urban corridor lined with dense informal settlements, by integrating architectural, urban design and landscape architecture interventions.
This Summer school provided a venue to reinforce synergies between research, teaching and practice as well as interdisciplinary design thinking incorporating considerations of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning. The topic of informal urbanism and urban conditions that it describes are complex socio-spatial, material and environmental system that requires interdisciplinary approaches and responses. In the field of built environment, informal urban conditions have long challenged the conventional disciplinary divisions in both academic and professional discourses.
By Dr. Amanda Ahmadi
