Abstract
This chapter reflects on the implementation of pop-up architecture and sensory gardens made with waste reuse in brownfields. The selected experiments, MOBILELAND© (2014-2016) and DOT TO DOT© (2017 onwards), investigate waste reuse as pop-up sensory reactivation of gap sites in Glasgow. Experiments explore constructive sensibilities embedded in material sensory by interlinking tangible place-making, sensory gardens, eco-design, and self-build solutions in public spaces. The cases underline design as sensory medium to effectively co-develop innovative environmental changes, societal challenges, and co-creation, including experiential outdoor learning and public engagement, throughout the reuse of waste applied in remaking by testing/piloting the C2C theoretical framework. Trials apply the principles of temporariness, portability, and sensory of waste as social value and material culture in cities. These live projects explore constructional and somatic sensibilities and critically investigate the cultural embodiment of material sensory by remaking.
TopPlace-Making And Place-Learning Through Remaking
Our planet is a fragile organism, so our cities. Our habitats are being urbanised, furnished and restructured and, in this process, they are being radically altered both ecological and socially. Today the Neoliberal model applied in urban economies (Brenner, Peck & Theodore, 2012) is promulgating a “new geography of centrality and marginality” (Sassen, 1997) not only between countries or regions but within cities. This phenomenon is characterised by motion, contestation, internal asymmetries, and discontinuous transgressions between territories in friction. Border conditions are connected with the establishment of socio-economic forces that rule the production and occupancy of everyday spaces generating discontinuities and voids in cities. Like borderlands, brownfields are heterotopic places that construct transitory, intermittent or spontaneous living conditions, away from any conventional planning (Suau, 2015).
People’s perceptions of cities are influenced by the built environment and sensorial body activities. In this context, temporariness, portability and sensory are essential components for the transformation of the built environment. The culture of building is grounded in the material object, through the use of construction materials, tectonic articulations and structural and climatic technologies. Architecture is placed in wider societal context, in which material uses and meanings are usually attributed to the “built object” regarding spatial, social, economic and cultural factors. As a living concept, the act of building connects users and building processes through design. It comprises both tangible and symbolic features.