Hoograven Invites You!

Theoretical model of a social practice, consisting of an exhibition, symposium and resident meeting.
The exhibition in the Pastoe Factory in Hoograven presented analyses and visualisations and challenges visitors to join in thinking about the significance of social design for urban development.





EXHIBITION
4 October, 2009 - 11:00 - 8 November, 2009 - 17:00

Local authorities, housing corporations and residents are wrestling with the legacy of the post-war building boom in all kinds of places in the Netherlands. Neighbourhoods that once embodied the promise of social harmony and individual fulfilment are by now suffering from impoverishment and disintegration. Demolition followed by the construction of modern new buildings seems to be the only remedy. But is this tabula rasa model really the ultimate strategy? Or are there alternatives that do more justice to the social ambitions of the original design?

In the Utrecht Hoograven neighbourhood, Utrecht Manifest involved all the parties (residents, corporations, local authority, training courses) in the transformation project Hoograven Invites you!, an urban design research led by the architects Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner. Their firm Urban-Think Tank is used to working in the slums of Caracas. Although everything is scarce there, the residents do not lack the inventiveness and energy to change things. The architects mobilise this energy to design and build communal facilities with the residents and thereby to strengthen the social structure of the neighbourhood, ‘barrio’, not by imposing terms, but by sharing entrepreneurship with the residents.
The architects are now following the same strategy in their approach to Hoograven. Students from Columbia University (New York), the Utrecht School of the Arts and Utrecht University take part in the exploration of the future Hoograven.

The exhibition in the Pastoe Factory in Hoograven presents analyses and visualisations and challenges visitors to join in thinking about the significance of social design for urban development.

Curators: Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner
Exhibition design: traast + gruson

The symposium on 6 October, challenged existing policies of (state-led) gentrification in urban regeneration areas.