We live in a globalized world and identify ourselves as global citizens. Yet, globalization has desensitized us to the diversity we live in today and the social potentials it has for a better future. In the latest demographics, about 25% of the Swedish population today has already foreign roots. The aim of the studio is to embrace the sociocultural variations we live in and explore the potential in this diversity, sketching out new relations between globality and locality, diversity and solidarity, country and city, the real and the digital, the tribal and the communal. In other words: What sort of forms of life can be imagined beyond secularisation, by starting to invite the foreign(er) to take part? And what role can architecture play in developing these new forms of cultural co-existence when it starts to create platforms exploring the potential of an architecture directed towards new forms of cultural expressions, exchanges and dialogue of a common future? In our investigation of the domestic and the public sphere we took a detour to reinvest what the meaning and ethos of these notions can be, reinvesting them with controversial potential and intense meaning through the idea and mapping of the foreign: how migration fuels innovation; can initiate an idea of the cosmopolitan where cosmopolitanism is not staged in order to paralyze political action, but on the contrary, to understand that the contradictory logic at the heart of the cosmopolitan concept is permanent negotiation, and by enacting so opposes the conservative rhetoric’s of a clash of civilisations.
Studio 2 2017-18