Departing from the increasing contemporary necessity to address issues of urban marginality, structural violence and community disfranchisement, we invited the students to explore the possibilities that urban designers -and researchers- possess to generate positive changes in contexts of scarcity. We situated the studio as a glimpse into recent practices that have dealt with such topics, while investigating the different sets of complexities that informal contexts contract in a close interaction with the people that comprise them. From that, the studio was set as a space of experimentation not only with processes of collaborative design, but mainly with the contingencies of construction and implementation of urban inserts. More specifically, small-scaled urban devices that worked in an informal settlement at the outskirts of Ahmedabad. Therefore, given that the object of design was a transportable architectural object that could accommodate diverse productive activities -while addressing infrastructural lacking in the neighborhood- we termed these ‘Light Infrastructure’. A device that was flexible, multi-functional and of a low energy impact, that simultaneously dealt directly with socially relevant (and hence politicized) resources.
