Departing from the increasing contemporary necessity to address issues of urban marginality, structural violence and community disfranchisement, we invited 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 work in an informal settlement at the outskirts of Ahmedabad.
Therefore, given that the object of design will be a transportable architectural object that can accommodate diverse productive activities -while addressing infrastructural lacking in the neighborhood- these were termed as ‘Light Infrastructure’. A device meant to be flexible, multi-functional and of a low energy impact, that simultaneously deals directly with socially-relevant (and hence politicized) resources.
