Independent thesis Advanced level (professional degree), 20 credits / 30 HE credits
Societies of today faces social, ecological and economic crises with increasing segregation and inequality among people and places. Individualism and competitiveness is diminishing the general feeling of togetherness with a loss in trust, alienation and increasing ill health. Through privatizations and enclosures of common and shared resources, the care for what is held in common, as well as the care for a common future, is lost. The main desires are mostly related to consumption, which is causing severe environmental consequences.
There is a need for a holistic approach, interlinking ecological, economic and social systems. To handle current crisis and future challenges, resilient societies must be constructed to meet the complexity of unknown, uncertain futures.
The current times requires common actions enabling time and space for negotiating, practicing cooperation and desiring a common future. Collectives of people sharing stories and experiences, can create new forms of togetherness. The role of the architect as the autonomous expert needs to be challenged and the short-term thinking within design, its inherent production of desires and scarcities, needs to be questioned.
Collective ways of working are explored through situated projects in different contexts and scales. Raising global issues through local concerns. The projects aim to reactivate cultures of collaboration and investigate how to make time and space for new encounters enabling the sharing of experiences and knowledges.
By making together, visualizing what could be and projecting an alternative future, things might be set in motion. Through raising the matters of concern in unexpected contexts, making them spatial (and telling new narratives), the imagining of a different world might become possible.
Common making requires practicing the skill of cooperation where eventual divisions and conflicts needs to be recognized. There is a need to suggest, to act and to make new narratives spatial. Independent of scale, all encounters matters.
2017.