This research is about responding to this and looking for models to support temporary use during two key periods in these projects’ lifespan – start up, and in the case of longer term projects, establishing a sustainable model for continuity funding. The first phase looks at the aims and needs of key stakeholders (project instigators, property owners and municipalities) when getting involved in these projects, the second will look at a series of Dutch temporary use projects and the third will look at international case studies, to see where gaps in the Dutch experience might be filled by the experience of temporary use projects in other countries.

The output of the study will be a digital publication, available to download for free, under a Creative Commons licence. The results of the project should be useful both to those trying to instigate these sorts of project, but also to inform key stakeholders, such as property owners, municipalities and to the urban designers who wish to include temporary uses in their development strategies.

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Get involved in the project: fill in our survey on tenants’ or property owners’ experiences of temporary use projects and help us refine the research.

This project is funded by a grant from the Dutch Architecture Fund (Dutch).

This survey is part the Urban Tactics research project, which looks at business and financial models for projects involving the temporary use of vacant properties. It looks at the aims and needs of the main stakeholders in temporary use projects – the tenants, property owners and municipalities – to better understand the opportunities and constraints of these projects and then develop models to support temporary use during two key periods in these projects’ lifespan – start up, and in the case of projects going beyond two years, establishing a sustainable model for the long term.

Please take five minutes to fill in our survey on property owners’ experiences of temporary use. Click here to take survey

Are you a tenant who has rented a property temporarily? Please fill in our survey here.

You can find out more about the project here. It is funded by a grant from the Dutch Architecture Fund (Dutch).

This survey is part the Urban Tactics research project, which looks at business and financial models for projects involving the temporary use of vacant properties. It looks at the aims and needs of the main stakeholders in temporary use projects – the tenants, property owners and municipalities – to better understand the opportunities and constraints of these projects and then develop models to support temporary use during two key periods in these projects’ lifespan – start up, and in the case of projects going beyond two years, establishing a sustainable model for the long term.

Please take five minutes to fill in our survey on tenants’ experiences of temporary use. Click here to take survey

Are you a property owner who has let out a property temporarily? Please fill in our survey here.

You can find out more about the project here. It is funded by a grant from the Dutch Architecture Fund (Dutch).

The next 72 Hour Urban Action competition will take place in Derry-Londonderry next year, as part of the UK’s 2013 City of Culture Celebrations. Killing Architects is working on the architecture and urbanism content for the competition.

A workshop was held at the Verbal Arts Centre  in Derry on 6 November to lay some of the groundwork for the competition.  We spent the day working with a group of local residents, artists, architects, designers and community workers,  researching potential sites for the competition and making short films about what we saw and heard in the city.  We also met a lot of great people over the course of the week we spent in the city, with some very exciting collaborations in the pipeline.

It will start off with a series of interviews with municipalities, developers and other large land owners to find out what value they see in temporary use and where their interests coincide with those of the people doing these sorts of project.  From there it will begin to look at a series of case studies to see what makes them tick.  Dutch projects will be looked at first, to identify opportunities, constraints and difficulties in the way that they were realised, before looking at a series of international projects, which may hold some of the solutions.

On Thursday 15th November there will be a #citychat twitter discussion which we are running together with MIT Community Lab.  Everyone is welcome to join the discussion, but even if you don’t have a twitter account, you can follow it here.  We have a fantastic panel for the discussion: Adeline Carrier and Maggie Stephenson of UN Habitat Haiti; Alexis Erkert and Kristin Chege who are tweeting on behalf of Under Tents Haiti, a campaign for the right to housing; Darren Gill of Architecture for Humanity; Harley Etienne, professor of urban planning at University of Michigan; and Braulio Morera of Arup International Development.

We are holding a one day workshop on 30th November, kindly hosted by CENDEP at Oxford Brookes. The workshop will be a structured day of discussions and exercises to allow us to explore the different ways urban and humanitarian practitioners describe, think about and work in cities and possibly identifying some ways forward.  If you would like to join us, please send an email to hello@reconstructingthecity.org by 16th November, telling us a little about yourself.

Finally, the (re)constructing the city website is now online.  It will bring together all of the films from the project, transcripts and reports on the outcome of the twitter discussion and workshop and articles produced by the (re)constructing the city team.

This project is funded by an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects Research Trust.

How can relevant urban design practices be incorporated into the work of aid agencies working towards the reconstruction of urban areas in the recovery phase of a humanitarian response, as part of the process of achieving durable shelter solutions for the population affected by the disaster?

The ‘(Re)constructing the city: integrating urban design into humanitarian response’ research project will attempt to attempt to answer this question through a mix of literature review, interviews with humanitarian workers and finally, a one day workshop, to be held in London in December 2012. It has been funded by an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects Research Trust and is being done in collaboration with Dr Kate Crawford, and with Dr Camillo Boano of the Development Planning Unit at University College London.

The rapid growth of cities has lead to an urbanisation of vulnerability and a corresponding increase in urban disasters. Humanitarian agencies’ experience over the past decades has been overwhelmingly rural, so that approaches to shelter and reconstruction and the tools and guidance which help to shape a response are rooted in a rural context. These rural approaches have too often proved to be inadequate to the challenges of cities, where humanitarians have been confronted by high population densities, a shortage of land and a complex and delicate economic and social ecosystem, a context for which their rural ‘toolkits’, assumptions and experiences have left them poorly equipped.

An initial study suggests that urban design practices do have an important part to play in the work of aid agencies in urban areas. These practices have not (yet) been adopted for two main reasons. Firstly, humanitarian agencies find it difficult to take a holistic approach to recovery, which it has been argued is necessary in the reconstruction of urban areas. The second issue is the mandates of humanitarian agencies and their focus on the individual, which creates difficulties in working at a larger, community scale, something which is regularly necessary in reconstructing urban areas.

Decisions about land use which sit at the heart of planning are inherently political, while humanitarian agencies are sworn to principles of neutrality and impartiality, which preclude involvement in political processes. Urban planning also necessarily deals with people as a collective, while humanitarian agencies mandates insist on dealing only with individuals as a way to promote equity. Both sides can see the need for the other’s skills in reconstruction after a disaster and yet, deep (professional) cultural differences prevent their working together. This research will look at how urban design tools can be integrated into humanitarian practice in a way that does not compromise principles, or require a total overhaul of working methods.

Killing Architects has been selected to go through to the next phase of the Scarce Times: Alternative Futures project, which looks at potential futures for Bromley by Bow, a neighbourhood of east London.  I’ll be collaborating with one of the four larger teams who were selected and we’ll be working together with the Architecture Foundation and Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment (SCIBE) at the University of Westminster.

Five workshops will be taking place over the next couple of months, with the aim of presenting more-fully developed proposals at the European Urban Summer School at the end of September and starting to put the projects into action in October.

The workshop is being run by Stanica, a cultural centre based in Zilina, Slovakia. They are part of the Trans Europe Halles network of European cultural centres. The workshop is part of their Engine Room project, which runs for three years, to May 2014, and which is about support independent cultural workers to help make their work sustainable.