Fun City
This project is about making cities more democratic and dynamic by making them urbaner. Democratisation aims to combat segregation and promote equality within the city, whereas dynamism creates the potential for self-organisation and entrepreneurship.
Fun City focuses on urbanising the city because the particular playful and political qualities of urban interaction give rise to the unknown and the new, thereby providing creative solutions for urban problems, but also making the city more magical.
Fun City imagines the design of a new urban commons as a process that involves three separate elements interacting to create a more urban city: Sensitivity of the city, Urban rhythm, and Layers of interactions. All three elements are considered in the context of the Boleyn Ground, an area to be developed in the near future when West Ham United moves to the former Olympic Stadium.
The Fun City aims to combine traditional infrastructure and public services, such as clean water, roads with skeletal building structures with collective ownership and people paying for the right to use in order to appropriate and inhabit the structure. Many variations of self-building could be imagined.
The building process would act as a counter-cyclical measure similar to the building of other types of infrastructure, and this could be done in local communities by employing groups of otherwise unemployed residents (especially youth).
Spatial compositions could be tested (and discussed) in 1:1 by placing a building crane in the centre of a future urban space. This would take collaborative design and co-production of space to a new, much more concrete and complex – but also potentially fun – level.
Jens Brandt
An architect by education with a background in visual arts and theatre. Working with the socio-spatial dynamics of the city. The main focus is how to make the city more urban by taking it to the streets – making public space a workshop, laboratory, playground and a parliament.
Collaborators:
Kresimir Zmijanovic and Ana Somek
