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The Informal Urbanisms: Agents of Public Space in Union Square workshop is comprised of two groups of students from Parsons The New School for Design and the University of Sao Paulo worked together in New York City from January 12th – 23rd in an intensive workshop employing the experimental approach of Research-as-Practice. The Research-as-Practice model resulted in a workshop that was open-ended, where a specific goal and outcome were not predetermined. Rather, the goals and outcomes emerged throughout the workshop while we simultaneously researched the topic by engaging with APS.
INFORMAL URBANISMS | URBANISMOS INFORMAIS
Opportunities for intervention exist between the exchanges that occur within systems of formal and informal urbanisms. There are various types of urbanisms that exist within the realm of informality – ranging from being a dog walker to having a barber shop comprised entirely of a chair on a sidewalk with a mirror precariously hung on an adjacent brick wall. While all forms of informal urbanisms take advantage of the potential that the city has to offer as a resource, street vending in particular benefits from added layers of ambiguity and even its consequential counterpart: precariousness. Ambiguity is manifested in the transactions and encounters that take place between the informal and the formal, the accessible and the inaccessible, and the known and the unknown. Our research attempts to map out these moments of transaction in order to locate instances of ambiguity.
Vários são os meios possíveis para a intervenção entre os sistemas de urbanismo formais e informais. A informalidade no campo do urbanismo é complexa e variada – desde um artista de rua até um vendedor de comidas com todos seus equipamentos. Enquanto todas as atividades informais aproveitam o potencial que a cidade tem para oferecer como um recurso, o ambulante em especial acrescenta a ela camadas adicionais de ambiguidade e até mesmo o seu inverso, a precariedade. A ambiguidade é manifestada nas transações e encontros que ocorrem entre o informal e o formal, o acessível e o inacessível, e o conhecido e o desconhecido. Nossa pesquisa tenta mapear esses momentos de intersecção, a fim de localizar os casos de ambiguidade.