Anagram Urbanism - Re-shuffling the City

Jellyfish Theatre London 2010 (image source)

When skimming through my notebook today, I got reminded of a lecture by German artists Köbberling/Kaltwasser back in November at the University of the Arts Berlin. The artists were presenting a series of projects and urban interventions in public space under the subject of considering the city as anagram. Their site-specific interventions use locally sourced materials that are transformed into object-like architectural constructions. Characteristically, the appearance of those constructions is imperfect and unfinished. After the destruction of the installations, objects and houses, the materials the artists have been using, disintegrate in the materiality of the city again.

Open Source Urbanism – The Hacking City

There exist various different notions of Open Source Urbanism and in recent years various – sometimes crucially different - approaches to conceptualise phenomena in the contemporary metropolis have been developed under this terminology. Saskia Sassen’s talk on Talking back to your Intelligent City at the BMWLab last summer was recently put online and has been inspiring this post.