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Design as Scholarship
Organic Urbanism via Collective Site Appropriation
Arturo Frediani & Rafael Gómez-Moriana
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An urban design studio conducted in Barcelona in 2016 put into practice the generative forces of organic urbanism. In a collective site appropriation workshop held at the outset, groups of students physically claimed land plots using stakes and fixed lengths of boundary tape, thereby designing and drawing a provisional urban plan at full scale. Throughout an iterative studio process, ongoing conflict and negotiated trade-offs eventually resulted in the highly resolved urban and architectural design of a neighborhood. The course demonstrated the possibility of simulating a genuinely organic urban design process consistent with theories of architectural ethology, specifically Evolutionary Aesthetics of architecture.

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