REMIX / Urban design & Architecture
E_XQUIS / New York City

Cities come to life through the overlapping ambiences they host: either as a kind of software, in cultural movements, or a kind of hardware, in the physical forms of the architecture of the city itself. The unique nature and identity of any urban location emerges in an irreducible resonance that is produced between that 'software' and 'hardware'.

The Unit will bring into place a wider mix of possibilities for the urban place of Shimokitazawa, by creating a convergence of information and media through which its culture can be manifested, informed and enacted. We will engage a game where innovative future visions are created, produced and played through, producing evidence of alternatives to the neighbourhood of Shimokitazawa, which are connected to diverse manifestations of local and global participation, and to physical and digital softwares, potentially linked to its presence.

The participants will create games and engage a systematic exchange of their work in different media - text, drawing, film, etc - that will allow them to play each others future scenarios, as well as produce a potential for enhanced participation from the community at large. In this way, a more specific definition of urban materials will be played out to help uncover those already at place and those to be invented for potential use as architectural and urban characters. The outcome of the playing of strategies, will be videoblogged in diverse "places", of local and global relevance to the problematic of the situation.

There will be a parallel connection with the Advanced Architectural Design Summer Studio at Columbia University, New York, lead by Ed Keller and Douglas Diaz, where the 2 groups will take advantage of each other's research and criticality of proposed strategies.