The point of departure of this CAPA.CITY autumnschool is that we need a new movement Reclaim the Suburbs that supports residents to organize themselves and initiate own retrofitting projects; projects that do reduce the societal costs of their mode of living, but also fit within their housing dream: garage-box entrepreneurs, multigenerational villa-collectives, eco-garden networks, crowdfunded community services or renewable energy cooperatives. The CAPA.CITY autumnschool will collect and discuss ongoing Reclaim the Suburb initiatives, with a focus on the capacities that collectives need to develop, in order to initiate, run and sustain such initiatives.

Argument

There is an increasing consensus that the societal costs of dispersed, low-density and car-dependent suburban developments are too high. To reduce these costs, planners and policy makers are formulating strategies to retrofit suburbs: densifying them, diversifying them or simply erasing them. What they did not expect is that residents would protest: Not In Our Backyards.

This reminds us of the ’60 and 70ies when planners and policy makers sanitized complete city parts because they were considered unhealthy, chaotic and ugly. This meant the start of the Right to the City movement (Lefebvre, 1968; Harvey,2012), assembling citizens to reclaim their neighborhoods from top-down planning.The point of departure of this CAPA.CITY autumnschool is that we need a new movement Reclaim the Suburbs that supports residents to organize themselves and initiate own retrofitting projects; projects that do reduce the societal costs of their mode of living, but also fit within their housing dream: garage-box entrepreneurs, multigenerational villa-collectives, eco-garden networks, crowdfunded community services or renewable energy cooperatives.The CAPA.CITY autumnschool will collect and discuss ongoing Reclaim the Suburb initiatives, with a focus on the capacities that collectives need to develop, in order to initiate, run and sustain such initiatives. A series of professionals with an expertise in participatory design and planning will assist us:

• GivRum (DK), experts in the participatory revitalization of empty buildings and urban spaces. https://givrum.nu/
• In Vivo (F),authors of the “BIMBY” (Build In MyBackYard) protocol, a participatory approach to soft densification. http://www.lab-invivo.eu/
• Intrastructures (Be), founders of theOpenStructures project, an open modularconstruction model. http://mail.intrastructures.net

Important dates

• 24th of June 2019: Deadline submission motivation

• 1st of June 2019: Notification of acceptance
• 2nd of September 2019: Deadline submission of a poster

Organizational committee

Hasselt University (Belgium) 

• Oswald Devisch, 
• Teresa Palmieri ;

Roskilde University (Denmark)

• Majken Toftager Larsen,
• John Andersen ;

ENSA-Marseille (France)

• Marion Serre.

Contact autumnschool: oswald.devisch@uhasselt.be

More information:www.capa-city-ensuf.eu