Invited by Associate Professor Hocine Aliouane-Shaw, our new Lecturer Mirian Calvo traveled to Bordeaux to co-facilitate with Lecturer Sally Daniels (UWE Bristol) a two-day workshop on Participatory Architecture and Co-design to the Master’s students at Rebuilding the World (RBW) and to the urban planning students from the School of Architecture Bordeaux (ENSAP-BX).
The workshops were held inside the heart of the ongoing participatory refurbishment of the quartier Ensemble à Claveau, North side of Bordeaux, developed by Nicole Concordet‘s architectural practice – Construire. Claveau Village was originally conceived as a garden city of 250 social housing scheme, developed during the 1950s by the local municipality. This feature of the workshops made possible to merge theoretical concepts with real-life participative processes.
Students gathered in Nicole Concordet’s architectural practice, which is embedded inside Claveau Village, for two immersive days focused on participatory architecture and co-design methods, and its application to an educational project in Rovigliano, Italy. Tangentfield architectural practice virtually connected during the workshops and acted as the students’ client providing insightful feedback.
Over these two days, lecturers and students shared community meals with the locals in their social hub, saw self-building and gardening workshops, and developed participatory proposals for Rovigliano. They also walked the quartier with Nicole’s architects who explained their ongoing engagement and techniques to leave the locals in charge of the engagement once they are gone.
This collaboration will continue next year.
Mirian Calvo