Light Infrastructures

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.