The ongoing privatisation of space, fulfilling capitalist interests, and the fast-paced nature of urban development calls for alternative ways of designing our cities, to still being able to creating spaces for the common good: designing from and for the cracks, interspaces, glitches, undergrounds, spaces of the informal, spaces of resistance and alliance...
Against this dense thematic background, UDP1 turns to the lived reality of urban everyday life and the multiple tensions – social and political, temporal and spatial – that arise from unresolved situations of urban in-betweenness. We will seek out traces of historic change, explore sites and places, examine institutional frameworks and map networks of actors and everyday practices that re-negotiate the limits of the urban in-between. We will focus on liminal sites across recreation, education, production and reproduction: class rooms and playgrounds, street festivities and concerts, refugee shelters and prison complexes, harbours and hotels, factories and families. How does urban everyday life emerge, at these and other sites, as in-between, suspended between the old and the new? Who are the actors that are able to define and reshape the contours of the urban in-between? Who is absent or even excluded? What are the political, spatial and temporal tensions that are produced at these sites and how do actors address and negotiate them?