City Design (MA)
Lisa Marina Weigl
Lisa Marina Weigl is a recent MA City Design graduate with a background in urban research and interiors.
Previously she graduated with a first class degree, B.A. from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Coburg, Germany in 2018 with her degree project on the poetry of cities and post war British Social Housing Estates, their current challenges and the use of semi-private space within them.
Born in suburbia somewhere along the Czech/German border, she spent her training years in a contrast, living and working between German cities, the countryside and London. The city, its thresholds and its connection to its residents, first and foremost marginalised groups of society and subcultures, have therefore always been her main focus of research. This laying the ground for her following MA research projects on the city and its need for disturbances by oppressed groups has enabled her to put a challenging focal point onto the faulty system of capitalism and the absence of common space-making in architecture and urbanism.
In January 2020 she received a Scholarship to participate in Melbourne Pavillion’s lecture and workshop series of ‘What is Home?’. Looking at different ways of cooperative housing schemes as well as proposing an own scheme, creating a central home and network opportunity for young Aborigine women gave her the possibility to work together with urban planners, focus groups and likeminded students.
During her final Independent Research Project she spent her practice mentorship with Karakusevic Carson Architects, working together on how present day unrest can be translated into the cityscape of London and especially the Borough of Haringey.
Lisa has been operating as the Student Representative during the course of her studies. She is also part of the RCA Working Class Collective, supporting the experiences of being working-class in Universities such as the RCA. The group aims to promote the work and interests of working-class artists and architects inside the RCA and the art & culture world generally through events, talks, exhibitions and internal discussions.
Lisa considers herself as someone who's trying to strive for ways to escape the box architectural education has provided her and so many others with and thinking outside of it. In a world which piles up more and more challenges towards a young generation of city dwellers, creatives and thinkers which makes one almost numb towards negotiations of demands, and in a field which often calls itself revolutionary and able to make changes – it is time to reimagine architecture schools and practices towards new ways of influencing the making of cities. Far beyond bricks and mortar she has focussed her Independent Research Project on the ways of digital space making in connection with direct disturbance in the city. Protests, Riots, Revolts – social unrests - actions which are nowadays organised in digital space through digital activism are presenting an immense force and potential to change a governing system which oppresses marginalised groups. What her work in the past 15 months has been focussing on are youth and oppressed groups presented with a lack of opportunities through a capitalist system. The interference with the excisting system, either through creating an alternative care system amonst it, to question it or to disturb it radically have been the the aim throughout her research and propositional questions.
The concept of space claiming through subcultures and their creation of alternative infrastructures have been the groundwork of her project which then expanded into ways of creating digital networks made spatial across the city, through her proposal of ‘Rebel Rebel’, an architectural device of Interference leading towards disturbance.
Breaking the boundaries of architectural guidelines and at the same time spatial hierarchies have enabled her to challenge current systems in a way unintended by policy makers and their planner.
Need for Disruption
Tools and Stages of Protests — A collection of tools in protests. Case study objects: The Black Panther Party (of Self Defence) Zurich Youth Riots, 1980 Black Lives Matter
Spatialising Movement of Disruptions - The Black Panther Party — Analysing the party's movement across the city (West Oakland - Central Oakland)
Spatialising Movement of Disruptions - Zurich Youth Riots, 1980 — Analysing the youth's occupation of space and 'pattern' of disruption in the city centre
Rebel Rebel - The Device — The need, creation and eruption of a disruption device through digital activism. Digital activism is carrying an ultimate potential of interference, though lacks the needs of spatialising their demands and translate it into physical disturbance.
'Rebel Rebel' projecting — The device projecting demands anonymously onto government facades whilst at the same time creating a physical and digital safe space.
'Rebel Rebel' in the Street
Disturbance in the Urban Realm
'Rebel Rebel' at Turnpike Lane Station, Haringey
In a time where a pandemic causes a pressing need for new demands, with lockdown measures and over surveillance in place; and in a city which has been shaped by a society disregarding ungoverned presence of youth in the public realm, their possibility to rise spatially against their oppressors is being limited even further. There is no room for the young to communicate their unrest, except digitally. Such census oppresses a valuable contribution to an equal city.
Protests and their various stages carry the highest potential for the youth to directly influence urban society and an equal city making. ‘Rebel Rebel’ works with the impact of digital activism and translates digital interference into spatial interference cybernetically. The work focusses on a dissolution/interference of hierarchies in public space (the right of presence, freedom of movement) through breaking boundaries by disturbing infrastructures and communication networks in a system which doesn’t serve the youth. A structural, unfolding dome, with the street as its most influential environment, gradually occupies more urban space with growing digital unrest. It’s structural plan and Software is provided as open source material. By filtering activism information, e.g. algorithms, hashtags, petitions and direct messages through the software, it creates pressure towards the governing system to pay attention to. The information gathering depicts the first safe space - it happens anonymously to hide identities. By being projected into physical space (projection mapping), the information works as a surface (curtain) to hide protesters through distraction. The space occupied enables the youth to create not only a safe digital, but also physical network across the city and constructs an alternative infrastructure as a further stage of protest. ‘Rebel Rebel’ creates an urgently needed bridge between digital and physical space which can no longer be ignored, and by doing so introduces a new spatial practice to the school of architecture. A digital space in the urban fabric, a rebellious tool of freedom and safety. ‘Rebel Rebel’ is a ‘stateless’ safe space which enables opinions to be heard and seen, and is a motivator to re-imagine the city as a space of equality - overthrowing the spatial systems of oppression through radical digital and spatial rebellion/resistance.
Suppressed parts of society feel the need to claim their space in a world which ignores or works against them with an occupation of unsurveilled urban space. There is no doubt that in a post pandemic world the worst affected group of city dwellers, the young, will meet, yet again, a universal will to change a previous governance system and especially, to express it spatially.
Creating an agonistic resistance, the post pandemic City could be built on social equality. If care structures, independently, will be enabled to expand from the domestic into the urban realm, the very act would create common goods of education, the exchange of ideas and with that a communal self-governed organisation of resistance amongst residents, neighbourhoods and the city. A common responsibility would establish a ‘‘Young Urban Cooperative’’. In this every resident, no matter which age group, gets assigned the same dwelling space, whereas the internal living quarters get created communally according to the residents’ shared needs. This inner community structure is its own tool to express their opinions, needs and place in the city. It then gets expressed externally as a neighbourhood cooperative network.
The youth resistance begins with taking over the parliament, a building considered as ‘holy’, metaphorically and distributes part of it across the city in order to enable the youth to be part of the decision making. Taking apart the parliamentary building exclaims an act of resistance, a declaration that youth are regaining their voice in democracy and their influence over what happens in the city is as crucial as their existence. When the parliamentary act becomes part of the streets, the houses, the public squares, educational institutions and local shops, it ceases to be an institution where certain people meet in a closed building and decide the fate of a whole nation, but rather becomes part of the daily life, where youth can express their right to have a voice of change. A cluster of these Youth-occupied High Streets, organised through their very own self-governed structure would enable the exchange of goods and services across the city.
The city has the opportunity to change now! It must resist in order to create an agonistic society. It is now, that the Urban Youth will be ready to claim its rightful space and that very should be surrendered in order to enable a much needed agonistic resistance.
Size:
6:38In Collaboration with:
Access Decks and their Vision of Commoning — The projection of streets and street life, the potential of commoning was projected onto the vision of 'Streets in the Sky'. Is there also space to occupy circulations and access decks in a way of resistance towards a restricting 'new normal'?
Exposing Thresholds historically
The city is empty and yet it is not. Public spaces, squares, central main streets, high streets, they are almost uninhabited. This questions the whole city’s existence. The city was made for inhabitation, to be taken over. Density is what kept it alive, made sense of it. The people are still here, though not in public spaces we find ourselves seeking shelter in our own homes. And it is here, where class divisions are made visible. Space has been maldistributed amongst the city’s residents. Our experiences of self-isolation and the lockdown are shaped by class. Karel Teig argues in his book The Minimum Dwelling, that Buddha’s advice ‘freedom means leaving the house’, still very much applies to our own time. This translates into ‘casting off the dead weight of the traditional apartment. (...) It is here, that the relationship between men and women could end up being unliberated from having to endure the stress of common disturbances in a shared apartment.‘ Karel Teige even describes a primordial class struggle between man and woman, children and parents, as well as the so-called conflict between generations. Walter Benjamin points out that ‘the apartment becomes far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out’.
This work explores the unexplored. The unsurveilled. The semi-private threshold of the city. They are the places of escape, inhabitation and commoning. They have the potential of creating a network in themselves. Following up on the idea of streets in the sky and the supply of care through self-induced systems, this Research Projects analyses the possibilities thresholds historically held and the emancipations from systems they enabled. What should be recognised is the potential of the city to operate on its very own self-governed network in times of a crisis as this. Access decks, semi-private circulations and landings need to be free from restrictions and the possibility to grow and extend to be a place of true self-governance. This means to enable a reorganisation of everyday life and interactions amongst residents according to the new needs and measures caused by the pandemic. In these thresholds lies a possibility to balance the shifted density in living habits (gathering in dwellings) due to the pandemic regulations by initialising access to the outside, extending the dwelling to the threshold spaces and therefore creating a new network of care in the urban realm as we learned to understand it in 2020.