Zoom, Online
The 22nd Urban Forests webinar features artist-architect Elin Strand Ruin, who will present her work within the field of participatory architecture creating domestic public spaces. After the presentation, there will, as usual, be time for questions from the audience.
How could the ‘very freedom of art’ push and transform the role of cityplanning- planners, developers, architects - to take responsibility, and actively engage with just transitions across the localities they are rooted in?
Elin Strand Ruin presents her work within the field of participatory architecture creating domestic public spaces with caring qualities in collaboration with local networks.
Her work operates at the interface between urban politics and performative art-architecture and explores how to catalyse social change through implementing everyday functions activating the public realm.
In the projects The Kitchen Square in Hallonbergen and The Blind Alley in Istanbul participatory methods triggers a re-construction of the local participants’ own agency, developing methods created by their own change and strengthening their citizenship.
By mapping domestic care, making space for domestic publicness, and reflecting on urban renewal processes from feminist, environmental, and postcolonial perspectives, the research practice seeks to propose new performative methods for facilitating community empowerment and public resilience through what Iulia Statica calls “an ecology of care” (Statica, 2022).
In the international research project MAPURBAN / JPI research project (2022-2023) The Kitchen Square played a central role as a model and method to strengthen local social networks. MAPURBAN was accomplished in collaboration with Ann Legeby, Professor of Applied Urban Design at the School of Architecture, KTH, and a group of researchers from UCL, known, University of Kent, UK, and Free University, Berlin, Germany.