Complexity Maps

This is a short summary of the final presentation given at the summer school:

1. Reality of the park [CONTEXT], a tourist’s point of view
we worked in an area called Parco stura, or toxic park, or oxygen park, or actually we don’t know what park or is it a park
the place is a Tarkovsky-like zone area
characteristicpost-indutrial periphery [transitory residence, unused land, waste and pollution]
Europe’s heroin’s capital with enormous financial turnover 1,000,000 euro per month

Engage with its
-history [Olympic impact]
-geography [between turin and milan, affordable housing attracting both an immigrant community but also house-buyers, demarcated lay-out of urban gardeners,drug users and trafficers, prostitution, industry, leisure activity for older people],
-politics [public private intitiative for golf course and new transport infrastructure],

2. Client’s BRIEF
The client did work for the city helping the city in communication and planing lay out urbanist graphic designers their competence is on architecture
there are more urban centres in rome and milano, often established to communicate larger projects make people understand and deal with change
about 3 years old
since their are others in other cities in Italy this gives us the opportunity to consider the project as a prototype that can be replicated in other areas.
-stakeholders [gardeners, drug users and dealers, residents in the periphery, users of oxygen park, local government, business partners from local shopkeepers to Ivecco],
-future opportunities

a. The client wants
-representation of the perception of the place by the people who live there, because they are currently under-represented, from which their needs can be derived.
-participative tool that will facilitate talking about planning to those who live in areas subject to transformation
b. The client notices that
-it is necessary to avoid technical language
-the perception of the place by people who live their might have to be translated
-representing (in terms of making images) about the issues in the area might help to communicate the issues better
c.client’s role of intermediate
d.how we think the client can use this:
i. identify opportunities for change
ii. understand the dynamics and include actors they may have not been aware of before -
iii. understand the present siuation by continuing the current dynamics that can be projected into the future you can assess the
impact of certain planned interventions in relation to existing dynamics
iv. suggest an new method for the engage for what is in a particular place and modify their language about a particular place; go beyond the voting based (explore alternative models of decision making -this can have an impact on local governance (=political decision-makers + business elites + cultural elites)

3. time spent on different activities [METHOD]
a. 2,5 days interviewing people, talked to local government, newsaper, tv station, environmental agency, government planning people, architect, local shopkeepers, local residents, gardeners and other out of town users;
b. students processed data (narratives, scientific, policy, history, media reports);
c. from a descriptive to an analytic understanding of the forces that shape the local context [uncovering an urban reality, discovering of a political reality of an urban space for the first time]
d. make fysical maps that exist in the world

3b. STEP BACK
if you make these steps you develop another engagement from a traditional designer [intensity by which students defend their arguments, fierce veracity that confronted students with a reality where every day we were there a person died of an overdose, different from the ikea] = the classic designer model is a division of labour -the designer does not do the beginning r the end stage- [which following marx' argument always leads to alienation, in this case of the place]; issue of ownership; our model suggest a vision the embedded designer = is allowed to have an holistic vision of the place that does not produce scenario’s, but maps out possibilities for identifying new actors and bringing them with existing actors to the table. Our role is to intervene in the informational dynamics of the place, and create a democratic instance. We want to make a qualitative difference between our maps and the maps that exist

Link to final video presentation (slides only)