The city of Social Change and the Refugee City: Reimagining the Reno Pontoon

This paper involves an in-depth study of the story of the Reno prison boat for the asylum seekers and presents an re-imagination of this boat as a Heterotopic Space in the framework of an international architectural design studio. Inspired by Foucault’s "Of Other Spaces", this proposal attempts to rethink the Reno Pontoon as a counter-site, a kind of effectively enacted utopia covering alternative urban practices and sites which can be found within the city of Ghent. Instead of isolating refugees in a segregated space, it aims to achieve a social hyper-mix and accommodate interactions between the different groups of the society. The affordances and challenges of the proposal are discussed in relation to the introduced background; leading to the distillation of a set of design strategies for addressing the refugee crisis. In addition, the educational benefits and difficulties of the studio task are scrutinized from the perspectives of the coordinators and students.

Jaar van publicatie:2016